Unity lost? Reframing ethnic relations in Lloyd Fernando’s Green is the Colour

Abstract

This essay reads Lloyd Fernando’s Green is the Colour (1993) against the “lost” (forgotten, erased) but recently recuperated histories of ethnic unity in Malaysia to challenge the state’s account which paints the past as a time of disunity and animosity between the ethnicities essentialized as “races”. Specifically, I reframe the racial violence of “May 13, 1969” at the heart of Green is the Colour to argue that the novel gives the event a much more radical treatment than has been critically acknowledged. Instead of presupposing racial difference as the natural and spontaneous cause of the violence, the novel, I show, unmasks as myth the account by the state which renders its own complicity invisible.

Keywords:

• ethnic relations
• unity
• Malaysia
• “May 13, 1969”
• Lloyd Fernando
• UMNO

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Lucienne Loh and the anonymous referees for their valuable suggestions and comments on an early version of this essay.

Notes

1. The term “multiethnicities” is used to refer to all ethnic groups constituting Malaysia, the Chinese, Malays, Indians, indigenous people and others. It also signifies “the irreducibly mixed and intertwined racial, ethnic, linguistic and religious histories that characterise, in particular, certain parts of South and Southeast Asia” (Perera 14). On race and cultural production in Malaysia, see Lim (The Infinite; Overcoming); and Goh et al.

2. For detailed discussion on the rise of a new wave of filmmakers in Malaysia and their (dis)engagement with “race”, see, for example, Khoo.

3. For detailed discussion on the left‐wing movement, see, for example, Muhammad; and Cheah (“The Left‐Wing”).

4. On the self‐imposed exile of Chinese Malaysians educated mainly in Mandarin Chinese, see, for example, Wu; and Tee.