Abstract
After popularly classifying memory studies in three ‘waves’ – with Halbwachs, Bartlett, and Warburg representing the first and the Assmanns and Nora, the second – Astrid Erll (2011: 4–5) describes the third wave of memory studies as theorising memory as something more global (see Assmann and Conrad, 2010). This third wave coincides with current institutionalisations of memory studies in the academe as well as the launch of the Memory Studies Association, which, since its early stages in 2016, has sought to address issues of inclusivity.
Part of inclusivity entails reflecting on the links between local and transnational memories. Sierp and Wüstenberg (2015) claim that ‘the challenge in the context of memory studies arises from . . . understand[ing] how the local then molds the global in turn’ (p. 324). For example, conferring the 2021 MSA First Book Award to Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang’s The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan and that of 2019 to Catherine Gilbert’s oeuvre on Rwandan women’s writing testify to the interest in local memories that inform the global. Memory and Nation-Building: World War II in Malaysian Literature inscribes itself in this context of the field, as part of the short but expanding list of recent publications from 2017 to 2011 (see Martin, 2022: 19) that explicitly combine Asia and Memory Studies.
Vandana Saxena’s book, Memory and Nation-Building: World War II in Malaysian Literature, focusses on World War II (WWII) in Malaya, its representation in contemporary Malaysian literature, and its intersections with memory, history and the nation. The monograph comes at an appropriate time in the field of memory studies, that is, when non-Western, multi-cultural transnational (war) memories are needed to address a scholarly gap.
If literary representations of the war in Asia remain largely understudied, a book-length study of war memories in Malaysian literature is even a rarer find. Memory and Nation-Building: World War II in Malaysian Literature not only investigates the contemporary images of WWII in Malaysian literature and their continuing significance in the collective memory and nation-building in Malaysia; it also exposes the complexity of Malaysia’s multi-ethnic and multicultural nature. Given such configuration of Malaysia, where different communities remember the past from distinct perspectives, the war memories of Malaysia are multiple and often contestatory. Thus, according to Saxena, ‘the plurality of Malaysian memories and experience of the War conveys the impossibility of a cohesive or singular national memory’ (p. 8). As a reminder, ‘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’ (p. 3). As such, questions on ‘bound’ frameworks of social or national memory (see Halbwachs, 1992, and Nora, 1989) can already arise, aside from possible articulations of multidirectional memory (see Rothberg, 2009) within the same country.
Chapter 1, ‘Reading World War II in Malaysian literature’, introduces the complicated relationship between memory, history, and literature in the context of a war beyond Europe from the perspective of the multicultural context of Malaysia. Part of the complexity lies in the political choice of the language in which writers choose to write the memories of the war in the twenty-first century. Saxena chooses to analyse ‘a small section of Malaysian literature written in the English language’, although she recognises that ‘a vast amount of Malaysian literature in Bahasa Malaysia, Mandarin, Tamil, and other languages need to be explored further’ (p. 18). As an opening to the entire book, the chapter reminds one how literature can be ‘a space where monologues of history, identity, and nationhood are undercut by the narratives of the individual as well as collective memory’ (p. 18).
By placing Malaysian literature within the wider field of memory and WWII studies, Chapter 2, titled ‘Memory, Literature and Nation-building’, explains the monograph’s theoretical framework. As such, it offers, among others, a discussion of collective memory from Halbwachs onwards. More interestingly, the section begins with a quote from Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists (2012) that encapsulates the question that troubles Malaysia’s notion of nationhood: ‘“Who belongs to Malaysia?” or rather, “To whom does Malaysia belong?”’ (p. 24). Because of Malaysia’s context, the author problematises Halbwachs’ notion of a ‘singular collective memory, or a national memory tradition’, which is an ‘anomaly’ (p. 27). Similarly, Saxena questions Nora’s ‘nation-centred approach that insists on singularity’ versus polyphony (p. 43). However, the author finds useful several theories on emplotment and, in particular, Astrid Erll’s (2011) discussion of literature and memory to buttress her literary framework.
‘Multicultural Memoryscapes: History, Memory and Storytelling’ is the title of Chapter 3. Here, Saxena presents a close reading of Tash Aw’s historical novel, The Harmony Silk Factory (2006) to ‘explore the multiple chronotopes of memory that characterize a historical event at any point of time and their dialogic relationships with each other’ (p. 50). Drawing mainly from Mikhail Bakhtin, Saxena argues that this ‘multiplicity of narratives . . . is the hallmark of histories emerging from the postcolonial multicultural nations’ (p. 50).
Chapter 4, ‘Matrilineal legacies: Diasporic Women and the Legacies of Memory’, as the title suggests, examines the narratives of diasporic women as they contend with identities and roles expected from them within the nationalist imaginary. To this end, the author studies The Rice Mother (2002) and The Japanese Lover (2010) by Rani Manicka, a Malaysian writer of Ceylonese Tamil descent. According to Saxena, ‘wartime experiences mingle with the struggles of migration and dislocation; trauma and hardship alternate with creative and resilient forms of belonging, of relocation and renewal’ (p. 72). As family sagas, ‘the two novels are an account of diasporic memories that constitutes the intangible heritage of the community and the transmission of these shared memories over generations’ (p. 72).
‘Moving on: Changing Images of Japan in Malaysian literature’, the topic of Chapter 5, looks into the shift in collective memory towards Japan. Saxena reminds the reader how the decades that followed the war ‘saw a shift in the dynamics of the Malaysian and Japanese international relations, particularly in the field of politics and economics’ (p. 94). Malaysia’s Look East policy, which was instituted in the 1970s, ‘turned to Japan to emulate its model of development . . . However, such policy changes had to be reconciled with the sentiment of distrust against the Japanese at the ground level’ (p. 94). Such tensions and negotiations with the past are discussed through a reading of Leyla Shuri’s Morning Momiji (2019), an English translation of the Malay novel Pagi Semerah Daul Momiji, published in 2013. The novel recounts two parallel tragedies, the war in Malay and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Saxena remarks how, in the novel, ‘most of the Japanese atrocities in Malaya are told rather than shown . . . The horrors of the atomic bomb are seen directly [by the characters] through the charred bodies of dying men, women and children’ (p. 101).
On the contrary, ‘the narrative information regarding the Wartime cruelty in Malaya lacks the force and imaginative impact that the Japanese descriptions carry’ (p. 101). As such, for the author, the narrative ‘emerges as a parable of Malaysian nation-state and its official policies’ (p. 106). Moreover, the ‘so-called others within Malaysia’ – the Chinese and Indians – are forgotten (p. 107). Saxena thus warns how one ‘needs to consider whose memory is being articulated and endorsed to uncover the frameworks that dominate the discourse of the nation at a specific point of time’ (p. 112).
As its title indicates, ‘Mediated Memories and Nostalgia’, Chapter 6, explores ‘the colonial nostalgia that often marked the British historical fiction in the later decades of the 20th century’ (p. 117) through the genre of colonial romance. Characterised by its focus ‘on the central English protagonists and his or her relationships’, the colonial romance is usually ‘set against the backdrop of far-flung British colonies’ and features a mix of ‘history, romance, and colonialism’ (p. 117). More specifically, this section discusses the fall of Singapore through reviews in Amazon and Goodreads of the novel Tanamera (1981) by British author Noel Barber. Saxena observes how ‘the space for the reader’s reviews of Tanamera emerges as a place where the readers indulge in nostalgia’ (p. 134). However, the ‘critique of the empire, its exploitative ventures, and the colonial trauma inflicted on the natives are largely missing from the text as well as the reviews’ (p. 138).
The book’s penultimate chapter, ‘Towards Remembrance and Reconciliation: The Role of Literary Narration’, looks into Tan Twan Eng’s two critically acclaimed novels, The Gift of Rain (2007) and Garden of Evening Mist (2019). The section studies how the literary narrative offers a way to reconsider self and the other via the dialogic testimony that enables empathy and reconciliation. It ‘delves into the difficult task of reconciliation in the face of persistent memories [where] the notion of moving on [traverses] the route of anger, desire to punish, and demand for retribution before coming to terms with the past through the act of narration’ (p. 145). Such difficulty is perhaps encapsulated by the quote that Saxena selects from Tan’s The Gift of Rain (2007): The problem is, he said, ‘some mistakes can be so great, so grievous, that we end up paying for them again and again, until eventually all our lives forget why we began paying in the first place. If you’re able to remember, then you must make the greatest effort to put things right, now, before you forget again’. (p. 177)
Finally, Chapter 8 summarises the monograph in ‘Memories in a Multicultural Nation’. Predictably, Saxena characterises Malaysian memory as ‘diverse’, ‘carnivalesque’, ‘contestatory’ yet ‘co-existing’ (p. 169). Saxena argues that ‘this field of memory, though multicultural and multidirectional, is not equal, and neither do these texts of literary recall occupy equal space in the collective memory of a multicultural nation or the transnational reader’ (p. 171), which underscores the reality of a nation that continues to live in spite of and through contested, entangled, and multidirectional memories which, on one hand, challenge and, on the other hand, enrich its culture.
Overall, in spite of a handful of typographical errors of the book and a framework that understandably still relies on Western concepts of memory, Memory and Nation-Building: World War II in Malaysian Literature would prove to be interesting to scholars of memory, postcolonial, and Southeast Asian studies scholars for several reasons: it discusses the experience of WWII from the Malaysian perspective; it interrogates a singular collective national memory by introducing a context that is multiracial, contestatory and coexisting; it offers negotiations of Japanese involvement during WWII in Asia; it questions Malaysian women’s roles locally and diasporically; it examines the lingering colonial nostalgia; and, last but not the least, it prods into difficult issues of coming to terms with the past that still overshadows its present.