A dissenting voice: The politics of Han Suyin’s literary activities in late colonial and postcolonial Malaya and Singapore

ABSTRACT

This article examines Han Suyin’s literary engagement and advocacy in late colonial/postcolonial Malaya (today’s Malaysia and Singapore). It traces her literary activities – research on local literature, creative writing, bi- and trilingual translation of regional literary works, and innovative teaching of contemporary Asian literature – and discusses her “dissenting voice”. An expatriate writer and high-profile international literary figure in Malaya in the 1950s and 1960s, Han Suyin involved herself in debates over the cultural blueprints drawn up by colonizers and nationalists, the definition of Malayan literature, the fate of the colonizers’ languages, and the relationship between writer and society, laying bare contested or hidden political agendas and touching upon such taboo subjects as the “Chinese problem” and emergent neocolonialism. These activities confirm Han’s role as a member of the mid-20th-century cosmopolitan intelligentsia whose non-aligned, independent voice represented a “third position” that had an impact on a series of major policy issues.

KEYWORDS:

• Han Suyin
• dissenting voice
• decolonization
• literature
• Malaya
• “third position”

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Patke and Holden (2010) define expatriate writing as “the cultural outcome of European control over various regions in which authors born outside Southeast Asia worked and lived for part of their lives” (138).

2. Dr Cheng Tze-yu disagreed with Han on the date that Malayan Chinese literature began, saying it “should be at least 40 years earlier, 1880” (Han 1964).

3. Leon Comber, ex-husband of Han Suyin, claims in his foreword to And the Rain My Drink (Han [1956] 2013) that his resignation from the Special Branch of the British Malayan Police was due to the publication of this novel in 1956. In My House Has Two Doors, Han (1980) traces it to events three years earlier, in 1953. My research yielded results in favour of Han Suyin’s account and, when contacted, Leon Comber agreed he resigned in 1953, not 1956.

4. English-language literary journals published by students from the Medical College and the University of Malaya from the end of the 1940s to 1960s included The Cauldron, The New Cauldron, Focus, Monsoon, Tumasek, Impression, Saya, and Write. Among the English-language short story collections published during this period were The Compact, Bunga Emas, and Twenty-Two Malayan Stories. See De Souza and Yap (1994), University of Singapore, Library Reference Dept (1976), and National Library of Singapore Fiction and Literature Committee (1977).

5. Talib writes that “questions on the status of the English language in post-war years have to be viewed in the context of the rise of Malay nationalism during the pre-independence years from 1945 to 1963 (for Singapore) and from 1945 to 1957 (for the rest of Malaya)” (2002, 1–11).

6. Accused of being “a vehicle for communist propaganda”, Eastern Horizon was banned in November 1960 by the Ministry of Interior shortly after it had started in July (see “Magazine Is Banned” 1960).

7. Of the course handouts for “Contemporary Literature” designed and taught by Han Suyin in 1959–61, pages from the 1959 handouts were provided by Mr Liau Yu-fang (and hereafter referred to as “Han 1959”). Pages from the 1961 handouts (Han 1961) are from Boxes 59 and 61 of the Han Suyin Collection, at Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Centre, Boston University.

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Notes on contributors

Ina Zhang

Ina Zhang is a PhD candidate at the School of Humanities, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her publications include Han Suyin in Malaya: Medical Practitioner, Literary Writer and Social Activist (1952–1964) (in Chinese 2016); and Island of Stars – Singapore Stories (in Chinese 2016). Her research is primarily concerned with Chinese diaspora studies and postcolonial life-writing.