Leong Liew Geok recently retired from NUS. She is currently an Affiliate of its Department of English Language and Literature.
Abstract of Paper
Wilfred Hamilton-Shimmen's Seasons of Darkness: A Story of Singapore (1993), is a narrative epic which uses the multiple resources of history, geography, autobiography, biography and fiction to examine the evolution and erosion of multiracialism and multiculturalism in Singapore, through the life and fortunes of its Singapore-born Eurasian protagonist. In Seasons, the cultural discourse of being a hybrid contradicts the political discourse of a hegemonic national identity, which displaces and marginalizes it. The interplay between several centuries of the pre-colonial and colonial past, and the four decades of the present of the immediate text also contributes to the friction between the evolutionary and the prescriptive. This paper attempts to uncover the processes of cultural hybridity the narrative explores and supports, and to evaluate the critique of its marginalization that it offers.
Leong Liew
Geok
National University of Singapore
Seasons of Darkness: A Story of Singapore took Wilfred Hamilton-Shimmen ten years to write. Self-published in Klang, Malaysia, in 1993, for reasons soon to be obvious to you, the 677-page narrative, probably the longest text yet in Singaporean literature is set in Singapore, a country with which it comes increasingly, and passionately, to quarrel. Calling it a work of fiction, Shimmen provides the usual disclaimer that 'except for figures and events in historical context to enable the reader to place times and settings, all characters and incidents described within are wholly imaginary.'
But the resemblances between the life of Thomas Siddon, the protagonist, and Wilfred Hamilton-Shimmen, his author are too striking to be coincidental. Both were born in 1940 of an English father and a Eurasian mother of Malacca-Portuguese ancestry; both fathers were killed by the Japanese; both boys were interned with their widowed mothers during the Japanese Occupation of Singapore; after it, both lived in various institutions, depended on the charity of friends and acquaintances, and drifted in and out of poor-paying jobs until they set up their own businesses.
Seasons is of course more than just fiction, or faction. Largely autobiographical, it is a self-narrative whose epic ambitions are expressed in the sprawling richness and the textual inclusiveness presented by the different sites and uneven registers of narrative textuality which intersect and interrupt each other throughout. These 'disruptions' to the story of Thomas Siddon's life by Shimmen's habitual excursions into history, geography and politics are not so much digressive or distracting as cognitive of the crucial and often inescapable transactions between the self and the worlds beyond its own time, place, reckoning and control. Besides the many references to the ebb and flow of pre-colonial and colonial empires, and the movements of peoples, religion, and trade in their wake, Seasons is autobiographically anchored in the Japanese invasion of Malaya and Singapore, as Thomas Siddon was born in 1940, and uses another war, the Vietnam conflict towards the end, as a catalyst for emigrating to England.
The structural hybridity of the text is reinforced by the etymological inventories that punctuate it. Linguistic evidence is provided of Singapore's multicultural pasts in the citation of Hindu, Sanskrit, Malay, and Chinese (Hokkien) words, phrases and idioms and the parenthetical glossaries which accompany them. To take some examples from Malay: 'ma'salleh' (200) is explained in parenthesis as Malay slang for white man; 'cherlop' is given as 'someone who wasn't white but who behaved like one, meaning he was 'dipped in flour', and 'orang puteh pantat hitam' is glossed as 'White man with a black backside', meaning someone who wasn't really full White' (211).
The hybrid form of Seasons has implications for the reading of the autobiography. No individual is autonomous, no identity can be free of, or freed from, the history, geography and politics which delineate or cloud notions of race and ethnicity. In the collective sense, identity as represented in a community or nation must correspondingly, be constructed or evolve from these factors. In the case of Singapore, the cultural identities of its constituent races are not so subject to interrogation as the national identity of a 'polyglot collection of migrants from China, India, Malaysia, Indonesia and several other parts of Asia' and their descendants (Lee 22).
In Seasons, Siddon's profound sense of the pre-modern and pre-colonial histories of Southeast Asia, is at odds with what is perceived as a monolithic, officially directed history of Singapore, first by the colonising British, then by their successors the People's Action Party (PAP), with the myth of the so-called 'founding' in 1819 by Raffles, who, Shimmen argues, lied about the unknown character of the place in order to inflate his own importance. Many authorial remarks interrogate the policies of the PAP under the leadership of Lee Kuan Yew, and the unwarranted Sinocisation of Singapore, an island, once part of the Malay world and which Shimmen sees as a site of the historical and cultural hybridities which have for centuries characterized the region.
The reader is reminded that Singapore was one of three key cities of the Sumatran-based Hindu kingdom of Srividjaya (622), from the late 7th century until 1290, when Singapore was sacked by another Hindu kingdom, Majapahit, based in Java. [No mention however, is made of the legendary founding of 'Temasek' or sea port on the island by Sang Nila Utama.] Historically, the 'ancient Indians of the ancient Indian subcontinent were the first to arrive, a thousand years before anyone else.' Hinduism and Buddhism had come to the region in the first three centuries A.D. And Ishkandar Shah, the first Sultan of Malacca, had been a Hindu before his conversion to Islam. To his court, the Ming Emperor had sent Chinese princesses to wed the Malay princes, leading to the beginnings of the Babas and Nyonyas, before the Portuguese, Dutch and British controlled Malacca.
The Portuguese, Dutch, British, German, Spanish, Ceylonese and Indian ancestry
of Eurasians makes them exemplars of hybridity, products of the crossing of
Europe into, and with, Asia, by force of conquest, through religious conversion
and commerce. The Eurasians were among the earliest settlers who came from British
Malacca to Singapore after her founding by Stamford Raffles in 1819 with an
ethnic connection in the region (the Malays), mainly through their maternal
ancestors who were of Malay/Portuguese stock that went back as far as 1511,
the year of the establishment of colonial Portuguese Malacca (630).
In the colonial British administration of Malaya and Singapore, the social hierarchy was dictated by ethnicity or, put baldly, colour with the white rulers in privileged position, followed by the Eurasians, finely discriminated in the following order: 'Eurasians of pure white British fathers or mothers, second generation English-Eurasians, the educated well-placed Portuguese-Eurasians originally from Malacca and then Others [my italics]: British subjects of Indian, Chinese and Malay extraction' (339). When, after the Japanese surrender in 1945, the internees of the Sime Road Civilian Internment Camp had been transferred to York Hill, a half-way house, the discrimination was apparent. Most of the Eurasians had at least one English parent and all had been treated as enemy aliens by the Japanese, yet the British at the hostel hadn't treated them as compatriots, except the local-born Whites. The first-generation Eurasians had expected warmth and friendship but instead had received a cool, impersonal attitude. (125) One British soldier had been overhead calling them 'nig-nogs' (niggers).
In his quest for an ideal of an integral and integrated Eurasian identity, Shimmen is irked by the official policy in Singapore of grouping Eurasian as an 'Other' in the CMIO (Chinese, Malays, Indians and Others) of official nomenclature similar to the British categorization but conferring recognition in order of numbers rather than colour: the Chinese comprise 76.9% of the population, the Malays 14%, the Indians 7.7 % and the Eurasians 0.4% (or less than 1/3) of the 'Others' which make up the 1.4 % and where Arabs and Armenians are placed. The demotion of Eurasian status from colonial times, is injury compounded by the insult of having number precede indigeneity:
Surely the original Eurasians of Singapore who had first come down from Malacca, and their descendants after them, had more than an immigrant-right over newcomers who had only recently been attracted to the island since she had become prosperous? (630)
Shimmen's narrative is aimed at restoring to the Eurasian, now marginalized by post-colonial and post-independent dispensations, his rightful place in a multiracial society. Against what he sees as a political discourse of a hegemonizing ethnicity which favours the Chinese majority, a counter-discourse is provided to discredit, on historical grounds, the effacement of the past through the PAP's rewriting of history. A regional-historical identity as well as a cultural identity is posited as a truer alternative to the political creation of a national identity in Singapore.
Examples are provided about a 'de facto Chinese colonization' and Chinese racism, as in the building of a memorial to commemorate only the Chinese war dead, and the blithe silence about Straits-born and Baba-Nyonya Chinese as well as Indians, [Malays] and Eurasians who had also fought against the Japanese. The observation, moreover, that the Overseas Chinese in their minds remain Chinese for always, whether they are in Singapore or from another part of the world is related to the comment that the Singaporean Chinese isn't Singaporean unless the word 'Singaporean' means 'Chinese' as well. Apart from Shimmen's failure to distinguish between Chinese educated, English educated, and Peranakan Chinese in Singapore, and the real differences in mindset which continue to separate them, this ethnocentric conviction that the Chinese are all alike may be tested against several recent phenomena:
1) The Straits Times runs a monthly report summarizing and comparing the contents of [English] letters published in its Forum pages to those in [Chinese] letters published in the Chinese press as represented by Lianhe Zhao Bao
In July, when Richard Lim wrote an article in the Sunday Times about China, with the message that Singaporeans would do well to note the far-reaching transformations taking place there, he elicited several hostile letters to the press. One Chinese Singaporean called the PRC Chinese 'Cina', a derogatory term, suggestive of uncouthness; another suggested that Lim relocate to China.
The publication of Wu Ya [Crow], a novel about PRC women who 'operate' in Singapore confirmed the suspicions of not a few Singaporeans that female PRC nationals are determined to 'ensnare' Singaporean men to better their lives and secure Singaporean citizenship
4) A book written in Chinese about [Chinese] Singaporeans by Johoreans became a bestseller in Malaysia and has been translated into English. Among the unflattering remarks about Singaporeans, was the the depiction of Singaporeans uttering 'Cheap! Cheap!' on shopping sprees in Malaysia.
The marginalization that Siddon rails against cannot be blamed only on Chinese racism. Throughout his life, the many betrayals he suffers are perpetrated not only by the Chinese, but also by the members of a multiracial population' his own Eurasian mother who never considered her only child as anything but a burden and a nuisance; Maurice Dupon, his Ceylonese friend; Eurasian schoolboys who threatened to beat him up until he sought refuge by joining a Chinese secret society for protection; Indians and Pakistanis in their own countries who robbed and cheated him during his abortive attempt to hitchhike overland to England.
In the process of searching for an identity, he deconstructs his Eurasianness into constituent parts, but fails to rehabilitate them. Conventional sources of socialization, family, class, church, community, are all missing in his life. He eagerly picks up Cristang (the Malacca-Portuguese patois) from his mother, but has no opportunity to use it. He learns about his mother's ancestry, but meets no relatives. He attends church with his girlfriend, but finds no belief in the spiritual. He envies the Pestanas their family celebrations at Christmas, but he has no family to call his own. The existentialist angst which informs Siddon's search for a cultural identity is exacerbated by the ill luck which dogs his life for much of the narrative. The continual movements from one school to another, the sudden end of his education at his mother's behest, and changes in job, the attempts to support a young family, the dependence on the charity and goodwill of various couples and families, read like the serial misadventures of a picaresque anti-hero.
The cultural signals are contradictory: after a brief spell in a local Catholic mission day-school attended by Eurasian, Indian and Chinese children, Siddon is transferred by his mother to Melrose, a boarding school for 'half- or pure-White children',' where matron ensured that everyone did not forget their English heritage'. English exclusiveness is overturned by his departure for St Patrick's Boys' School where his fair skin and English accent mark him out; 'some of the boarders displayed open hostility towards him, as if he were some kind of strange being' (203).
But he determinedly becomes local, develops a dark-brown tan through daily swimming in the sea, learns to fight well, plays football barefooted, drops his English accent in order to speak like the others. The self-transformation is so complete that 'shocked disbelief' is registered on the faces of the very English Mr & Mrs Potts from Melrose when they visit him. On his part, Thomas is 'disconcerted at Mrs Potts' very English manner of talking to her husband,' which makes him an 'outsider.'
While castigating the rulers for racist discrimination, and in singling Lee Kuan Yew out for criticism, Shimmen is significantly silent about the good number of unalienated Eurasians who have played their part in the political development of his country. In the early years of the Republic, Kenny Byrne was Minister of Labour and very much part of the PAP leadership. The Eurasian contribution to public life by the President, Benjamin Sheares; Minister of Law, Edward Barker; Maurice Baker, Singapore's former ambassador to the Philippines and Malaysia; Herman Hochstadt, former Permanent Secretary to the Ministry of Education; and Barry Desker, Director of the Strategic Defence Institute and a former ambassador to Indonesia. The Eurasian contribution to Singaporean letters in the prize-winning novels of Rex Shelley could not have been anticipated by Shimmen as Seasons was published earlier.
Midway in his story of Singapore, Shimmen writes of Siddon:
'He was Singaporean and called himself one, even though his 'betters' told him
he was silly since no such word or concept existed.' Let me quote Lee Kuan Yew
in this respect:
The Singaporean, whether he is of ethnic Chinese, Indian or Malay descent, has
his own culture. Over the centuries, something distinctive may emerge, something
separate from China, India, Indonesia or Britain. However, if in the interim
you deculturalise a person, erase his own culture when you have not got something
to put in its place, then you have enervated him.
Siddon's frustrations, suggestive of a dislocated cultural identity, may also derive from the confused attempt to extrapolate the personal from the political so that the political is always read in terms of the personal. The tension between the individual's search for a personal-cultural identity, and the political/national/nationalistic identity which is the state's quest, leads to conflict and defeat. Siddon eventually decides 'to claim partiality, return to the land of his forefathers, claim his birthright and identify with his white origins' (672).
It is unfortunate that in a new country like Singapore, unlike more established countries, a national identity is rarely perceived as independent of a political party-driven agenda. Equally unfortunate is the perception in a multiracial society like Singapore's that cultural identity, especially for ethnic minorities, is threatened by national identity, or imposed upon by the cultural identity of the ethnic majority. Identity, whether cultural or national and dependent as it is on the people who reify it, is always evolving. This is particularly applicable to Singapore, a country continually in the process of reinventing itself.
The Eurasians too are redefining themselves for economic social and political leverage. Whereas in Singapore Eurasians: Memories and Hopes (1992), Myrna Braga-Blake, while acknowledging the lack of consensus among Eurasians themselves about an acceptable definition of their ethnicity, writes that 'Eurasian', a term that was first used in 1847 by the British for official purposes and again in 1849 for census-taking purposes (Pereira 19, quoting Wong 10), literally means a person born of a union between a European and an Asian and the subsequent offspring of that first 'mixed blood'. Because of the history of links between Europe and Asia, the European in the union has tended to be a man (11),the Eurasian Association has relaxed the patrilineal requirement to redefine the Eurasian as a person of mixed European and Asian ancestry who has shown a desire to be identified as a Eurasian. A Eurasian is a person whose family has been accepted as Eurasian by custom and tradition, and has shown a desire to be identified as Eurasian (Pereira 20).
Singapore's search for identity is new. It has been accompanied by the conviction 'that a heterogenous population could only survive and prosper as a nation if it were integrated into some form of multiracial, multilingual, multicultural society' (Siddique 207). What then make Singaporeans Singaporean? Consider eight possible cross-cultural, transpolitical, syncretic, evolutionary determinants of Singaporean identity-in-process.
An interest in food; love of food; eating at hawker centers;
enjoyment of culinary variety.
Without exaggeration, Singapore is probably one of the most cosmopolitan food
capitals of the world. One of the guides to eating here acknowledge the cultural
hybridity of the island: Makansutra is a neologism which blends the Malay word
for 'eat' with the Sanskrit word for 'rule/aphorism/chapter.
A passion for shopping here, there (across the Causeway) and everywhere else. True tales of Singaporeans who leave Changi with empty suitcases abound, and may come to be statistically proven.
A passion for sales, freebies, special offers. Sometimes food is thrown away because it is the toy that comes with it that is coveted. Sometimes, fights break out among adults queuing for free toys for themselves or for their children.
A belief in education as 'certification of self'; education as a marketable resource, a value added product.
A great interest in material investment and improvement. The English word, 'upgrade', used locally, carries distinctive inflections. It is often used with a reflexive pronoun as Singaporeans upgrade themselves by moving out of their HDB into a condo; or enroll for an MBA; or trade in their Toyota for a Lexus. Where else but in this city would 3Cs be upgraded into 4, or 5, Cs?
The practice of kiasuism: fear of losing out; the anxiety of (well)being; the belief in having a headstart over others; competitiveness (and thus the virtue of hard work). Concomitantly, the practice of kiasiism: being overly cautious; still afraid of 'losing out' and because of this, the necessity of working hard!
The English language. Despite diverse Asian roots, [younger] Singaporeans have the English language in common, the result of an English-knowing bilingual education policy which came into effect in 1978.
Singlish. Singaporeans understand, use and enjoy Singlish, government reservations notwithstanding. In time to come, Singlish may become an international signifier of Singaporeanness. The film, Chicken Rice War, which uses English, including Shakespeare's, Singlish, Cantonese and Mandarin, is a Singaporean take on Romeo and Juliet. It has been showing in film festivals in Los Angeles, Sydney, Canberra and Toronto. Reviewing the film for the Toronto International Film Festival, Noah Cowan writes that 'the real star here is [the director] CheeK's take on Singaporean English, a language most expressive in insults and complaints.
Shimmen's complaints about the Sinicisation of Singapore can be seen in another light: the need for survival of a republic which had to invent itself as a country (without a hinterland) after its precipitous departure from Malaysia on 9 Aug. 1965, and which must reinvent itself for its own well being. Singapore's survivalist mindset prompted it into distinguishing itself from its neighbours by emphasizing its advancement; its modernity relative to its neighbours. It has made Singapore seek economic models from outside the region for emulation and adaptation. And it has made the city state the odd one out. The latest exhortation by the Prime Minister to think within a 7-hour flying radius for future well-being may return the country to a region it left behind, for its own sake.