Transnational re-memorialization in Preeta Samarasan’s Evening Is the Whole Day

ABSTRACT

Preeta Samarasan’s Evening Is the Whole Day (2008) traces the Rajasekharans’ family history over three generations and re-memorializes the racial riots of May 13, 1969 from a Malaysian Indian perspective. Compared to an earlier phase of memorialization in Malaysia’s national discourse about racial and cultural identity, the novel engages in the process of re-memorialization from a transnational locus, that brings together the material contexts of the Anglo American publishing industry as well as Samarasan’s racialized belonging to her homeland as a mobile Malaysian. This doubly transnational frame is defined by a strong sense of injustice from a revisionist perspective, one that obscures the complex history behind Malaysia’s public discourse on race and reproduces the essentialism of racial categories. The novel’s regressive temporality is also a critique of Malaysia’s non-progression on issues of race, as much as it forecloses other ways of rethinking racialization in Malaysia.

KEYWORDS:

• Preeta Samarasan
• Malaysian Indian
• transnational
• memory
• race
• mobility

In an interview with Fiction Writers Review, Preeta Samarasan says of her debut novel: “I wanted to write a Midnight’s Children for Malaysia – yet I wanted also to make a book that was in some ways more female than Rushdie’s” (Samarasan 2008d, n.p.; original emphasis). Evening Is the Whole Day (Samarasan 2008c) is Samarasan’s attempt to capture the troubled history of postcolonial Malaysia’s divisive and pervasive discourse concerning race, by establishing an allegorical connection between the public sphere of the nation and the origins of a middle-class Malaysian Indian family, the Rajasekharans. Written at the distance of half a century after Malaya’s independence in 1957 and the watershed racial riots of 1969, the novel is a revisionist presentation of the country’s national history as well as an attempt, in Samarasan’s own words, to “reveal that history [ ... ] through individual lives” (Samarasan 2008d, n.p.). In order to depict through the lens of a Tamil household the psychological and emotional toll exacted by Malaysia’s continued exclusion of non-bumiputera communities, the novel employs certain literary techniques that have become associated with the canon of anglophone postcolonial writing, such as allegory and a non-linear chronology. By reorienting these techniques towards a depiction of Malaysian history from this period, Evening Is the Whole Day re-memorializes the recent past for an international audience, as a critique of racial discrimination that is aligned with the perpetuation of injustice along other social axes, such as class, caste, and gender within the Malaysian Indian community.

This process of re-memorialization arises, firstly, from the context of the novel’s production and publication for the US and UK book markets. Evening Is the Whole Day was, for the most part, written away from home and was first begun during Samarasan’s Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programme in creative writing at the University of Michigan, where an earlier version of the novel won the Avery and Jule Hopwood Novel Award in 2006. Blurbs of Samarasan’s debut novel by other literary authors positioned her work in relation to established Indian authors of the international set, with Peter Ho Davies describing Evening Is the Whole Day as “a magical, exuberant tragic-comic vision of post-colonial Malaysia reminiscent of Rushdie and Roy” and Ali Smith judging it to be as “furious, controlled, cool and urgent as Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger” (Samarasan 2008c, n.p.). In an author interview, Samarasan also highlights this affiliation when she alludes to the epigraph to The God of Small Things, a quote from John Berger, that “never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one”, so drawing an aesthetic connection between the fragmented and multiple histories of Roy’s debut novel and her own (Samarasan 2008d, n.p.). Elaborating further, Samarasan lays claim to a longer tradition of English letters, specifically Charles Dickens’s Bleak House for its focus on class and justice, and explains how she is influenced by the “big 19th-century narrator, the unapologetic prolixity, the somewhat formal, yet playful, diction” (n.p.). This underscores the positioning of Samarasan as a transnationally mobile author who can be read in relation to the larger anglophone canon, and for whom Malaysia remains a seemingly distant source of literary inspiration.

However, the novel’s attempt at re-memorialization is further contextualized by Preeta Samarasan’s status as a mobile Malaysian author who left the country due to social and economic barriers. In an autobiographical essay, Samarasan describes how she grew up as a member of the aspirational middle class in Malaysia in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with the keen awareness that non-Malays “would always be second-class citizens under the New Economic Policy (NEP)” (Samarasan 2020, n.p.). Her mother “took on the responsibility of making sure [she] would get out of Malaysia” (n.p.) and pushed Samarasan to excel academically to earn a scholarship, since the family was not affluent. When Samarasan finally left for pre-university in the USA, it was with a distinct sense of bitterness at the “institutionalized racism that had shaped [her] life” while continuing to feel strongly that she “had a stake in Malaysia’s destiny” (n.p.), one that she expresses in her literary work as an extended critique of Malaysia’s continued discrimination of non-bumiputera.

Hence, Evening Is the Whole Day is written from a doubly transnational locus, with its narrative shaped by allusions to a broader anglophone literary tradition and also textured by an exilic outwards journey from Malaysia. The present article will argue how both aspects are crucial to understanding the novel’s re-memorialization of the Malaysian Indian experience of racial minoritization from a transnational locus. By first discussing the novel’s paratexts in the form of its epigraphs, chapter titles, and end-matter against the Malaysian socio-historical context, I will show how the transnational circulation of Samarasan’s novel also requires a translation of Malaysia’s failures in social justice for a broader audience. In the second half, the article analyses the narrative’s regressive temporality and its implications for Samarasan as a Malaysian author working transnationally.

Preeta Samarasan as a mobile Malaysian author

In Evening Is the Whole Day, Samarasan’s literary project is to critique Malaysia as a nation where racialized identities are politically and economically mobilized. The plot of the novel centres on Chellam, a servant girl from the rubber plantations who goes up to the Big House, and who is subsequently framed for the death of the elderly Paati, when it is the paranoid selfishness of all other family members that results in a toxic atmosphere of indifference. Against the triumphantly progressive narrative of the first- and second-generation Rajasekherans’ arrival into Malaysia, and their subsequent building of the Big House as a reflection of their increased wealth and status, Samarasan’s portrayal of the middle-class Rajasekharan family is an allegory for the birth of independent Malaysia and the “selfish materialism” (2008b, 15) that resulted from a discourse of economic survivalism and interracial competition. Race, gender, and caste divisions intersect and Samarasan’s novel highlights how the truly voiceless, like Chellam, bear the brunt of the hegemonic imposition of fixed identities.

In the public sphere, the experience of alienation and exclusion from the newly formed nation is focalized through Raju Rajasekharan. The eldest son of third-generation Tamil immigrants to Malaysia, he is the grandson of a shipping company magnate and the head of the Rajasekharan family at the peacock-blue Big House. Returning from Oxford to the town of Ipoh in the Malay peninsula, which had “begun to split its thin colonial skin” (Samarasan 2008c, 23), Raju is something of a cowboy figure, pondering “his place in the newborn nation” (28). While many Indians in Malaysia still regarded India as their homeland during this period and chose to return there (Vadivella Belle 2014, 282), others like Raju believed in the ideal of a “Malaya for all Malayans” (Samarasan 2008c, 44): a place where each Malaysian is a true citizen, regardless of race. After the 1969 racial riots, Raju’s idealism becomes untenable and he falls into depression, “wondering if his life was over” (135). He is also especially incensed at Article 153 of the Malaysian federal constitution of 1957, which safeguards the special position of the Malays and acknowledges Malaysia as Tanah Melayu or Malay land, making them, as he points out, “the masters” (134) as opposed to Malaysian Indians who call it home.

By tracing the story of the Rajasekharan family from the time of their arrival in the peninsula in 1899 to their eldest daughter’s departure in 1980 to attend university in the USA, Evening Is the Whole Day can be understood as portraying the psychic and social after-effects on Malaysians of Indian descent of Malaysia’s public discourse on race. The present article employs the term “race” not merely as its popular English iteration of the Bahasa term bangsa, but also to highlight the ascriptive nature of such communal identities which have been imposed on individuals. Though processes of racialization within Malaysia have a much longer history, the bloody clashes between Malays and Chinese in Kuala Lumpur following the release of 1969 election results have been regarded as a watershed event that continues to ascribe and ethnicize the country’s Malay, Chinese, and Indian communities on the basis of impermeable racial boundaries. An after-effect of such racial ascription was to obscure the internal heterogeneity and varied origins of these communities, with the Indian community, for example, comprising not just Tamils as the majority, but Malayalees and Telegus drawn through the kangany system, as well as Bengalis and Punjabis (Ongkili 1985, 7), while the Orang Asli were encouraged to convert to Islam and adopt markers of Malay cultural identity after they were grouped together with Malays as bumiputera in 1963 (Holst 2014, 106).

While it is not possible to discuss Malaysia’s journey to independence in detail for lack of space, it is important to recognize that the “special position” of the Malays was part of official British policy as a form of trusteeship for indigenous institutions (Comber 2009, 13). The concept was alluded to in the decentralization debate of the 1920s, where the sultans and state councils were seen to be sidelined, thus forming the basis for a form of Malay nationalism known as Ketuanan Melayu, or Malay supremacy, through which the Malay race was bound inextricably to the concept of bumiputera or indigenous rights (Shamsul 2004, 324). The term bumiputera (literally “son of the soil”) has a political and legal dimension in Malaysia since it refers to a group of people construed as “native” and therefore deserving of preferential treatment, although it was already in use in colonial times (Holst 2014, 33). In contrast, the term also “foreignizes” Malaysian Chinese and Malaysian Indian citizens, who are seen as “immigrants”, pendatang (newly arrived) or penumpang (transients, squatters, or trespassers) (Gabriel 2015, 785–800), while the Orang Asli tribes were seen as Malay and hence bumiputera despite undergoing a gradual process of Malayanization.

In this complex intermingling of colonial policies amidst clashing doctrines of nativist primacy, now equated with Ketuanan Melayu, and the need for coexistence in the emergent Malayan nation, race was conceptualized in public discourse as an exclusionary difference between bumiputera and non-bumiputera communities that was expressed in the implementation of the NEP, as well as in the National Culture Policy (1971) which stipulated the centrality of Islam and “indigenous culture” to the nation (Holst 2014, 126). The National Language Act of 1967, designated Malay, though rightfully the pre-colonial language of the region, exclusively as the sole national language and the basis of a national literature. In a historical moment where language, race, and religion were perceived as synonymous, the non-Malay English-language writer was increasingly marginalized. Well-known poet Ee Tiang Hong sought to migrate because he “could no longer accept, intellectually or emotionally, the official and Malay definition of the Malaysian nation and culture” (Ee 1988, 36), while fellow poet Wong Phui Nam stopped writing all together in the 1970s, finding himself linguistically and culturally exiled in his own home (Wong 2007, 39).

Born in 1976, and growing up in the early 1980s, Preeta Samarasan would have experienced the political and social rubric of the NEP as racial discrimination, combining political and cultural marginalization of their ethnic group in the public sphere with policies that presented barriers to social and economic mobility. The exit strategies of non-bumiputera during this period are well documented, such as through higher education (Brooks and Waters 2011, 33), while the notion of “transnational exit” was present in everyday discourse (Nonini 2015, 248). Folded within such mobility was Samarasan’s inheritance of the marginal status of English which was subsequently transformed into a site for a transnationally inscribed politics of protest by the subsequent publication of Evening Is the Whole Day in the larger anglophone book market.

Hence there is a transnational dimension to Malaysia’s race discriminatory policies in the form of an escape from Malaysia, one that is registered through Samarasan’s own life-trajectory and development as a writer and expressed in Evening Is the Whole Day as a dual address of Malaysian and international readers. Samarasan can be seen as a “mobile Malaysian”, for whom Malaysia continues to be home, despite the continued understanding of race as an exclusionary state discourse mobilized as Malay ethnic nationalism. A term coined by the Malaysian sociologist Koh Sin Yee, the “mobile Malaysian” designates one who migrates abroad; such people often continue, nonetheless, to evince a strong sense of loyalty to Malaysia based on affective communal or place-based experiences (Koh 2017, 197). Typically well-educated and affluent, the mobile Malaysian Indian or Malaysian Chinese labours under racialized notions of citizenship, compounded by personal experiences of discrimination as a non-bumiputera. A culture of migration in search of social or economic opportunities allows mobile Malaysians to navigate structural obstacles in education, employment, and opportunities for enterprise (137). Yet, as Koh elaborates, such survivalist attitudes are frequently coupled with a discourse of disloyalty to the nation when a Malaysian relocates permanently (8). Such migration overseas to more affluent nations such as Australia and Canada in the 1970s and 1980s should not be confused with Aihwa Ong’s (1999) concept of flexible citizenship (19), where multiple citizenships are a wholly pragmatic strategy for relocation and transnational capital accumulation. Instead, the prevailing view is to keep one’s Malaysian citizenship “just in case” (Koh 2017, 206), thus evincing a continued racialized identification with being Malaysian Chinese or Malaysian Indian.

Existing scholarship on the novel, however, does not fully register this crucial socio-historical context undergirding the transnational positionality of a Malaysian author, whose mobility is anchored in a racialized belonging to Malaysia, and how this context is further registered in literary representations of the past. Critics have read Evening Is the Whole Day as a diasporic critique of national consciousness, which testifies to how “anticolonial nationalism has not so much failed as it has not been given a chance to succeed or properly take shape” because colonial racial differences persist as a residue in terms of social and economic inequalities (Gui 2013, 182). The novel’s leaping back-and-forth between different decades has also been understood against the figure of Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, whose fixation on “lost potentials that disallow the amelioration of conventional narrative closure” points to the inadequacy of cosmopolitical mobility, since Uma’s departure from Malaysia does not effectively protest against the power politics of her home (Erwin 2014, 215).

Building on these approaches, the present article registers both the localized politics of race for reading Evening Is the Whole Day and the implications of Samarasan’s transnational positioning for literary techniques in the novel as further framed by the novel’s paratextual materials. More importantly, the novel’s transnational address makes a claim for re-memorializing the racial discrimination of Malaysian Indians as a retelling of recent Malaysian history in the world’s eyes – a claim that this article will discuss as unprecedented as well as subject to certain distortions from a temporally and spatially distant perspective.

The transnational address of Evening Is the Whole Day

According to Nielsen Bookscan data, Evening Is the Whole Day had by May 2019 sold 9668 copies in the UK, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, which is a not insignificant number. Moreover, as a work that is “circulating out into a broader world beyond its linguistic and cultural point of origin” (Damrosch 2003, 6), Samarasan’s novel may be interestingly considered as world literature for its “mobility”, though its circulation occurs amidst the cultural politics of literary gatekeeping, where Malaysian writers, in writing about their homeland, are perceived as translating and reinventing material from a lesser-known cultural location for a broader audience. With the further marketization of the postcolonial brand in the second millennium, the Anglo American publishing industry functions as a conduit for the circulation of literary works from authors on the cultural periphery. Sarah Brouillette (2011) has written at length about how these writers “face the expectation that their fiction will comment on their own locales for a larger, more diffuse audience” (8) amidst the growing corporatization and professionalization of the publication industry.

Reviews of Evening Is the Whole Day in the international press praise the novel for its richly realized and multilayered presentation of Malaysian history, conveyed with an emotionally charged depiction of character and situation. While commentators recognize that Samarasan’s debut novel deals squarely with the racial politics of her home country, what emerges distinctly is a continuous likening of Samarasan to major Indian writers in the international arena, as part of a growing cross-cultural canon of literary fiction. The New York Times lauds Samarasan for “her ambitious spiraling plot, her richly embroidered prose, her sense of place” while asserting that readers will “immediately compare her to Kiran Desai” (Goodman 2008, n.p.), while The Independent notes that her publicists continually compare Samarasan’s Evening Is the Whole Day to both Desai’s and Arundhati Roy’s first novels “as if being a young, photogenic woman of Indian origin, she shares something with them” (Tripathi 2011, n.p.). Curiously, reviews in the Malaysian newspapers have criticized Evening Is the Whole Day for its stock characters and stereotypical plot (New Straits Times 2008, 13), while another proudly reports that the novel has been well received abroad, and notes that the lack of a glossary for untranslated Malay and Tamil terms would result in an inaccurate understanding of local nuances (Mehta 2008, 62). Both sets of responses point to an assumed responsibility towards cultural and national representation, one that is further complicated by the perception, in the international press, that Samarasan’s novel is part of “the quiet emergence of new Malaysian writing” into the world (Tripathi 2011, n.p.)

For a broader audience, the transnational address of Evening Is the Whole Day thus possesses the quality of being unprecedented, in its extended representation of the racial troubles encountered by the Malaysian Indian minority, which is itself a re-memorialization in literary form of events in Malaysia up to the 1980s. The earlier memorialization of racial unrest leading up to the May 13, 1969 incident occurred amidst national debates about the cultural and linguistic fabric of the nation, undergirded by tribalist loyalties that situated language usage within the framework of ethno-linguistic nationalism (Leow 2016, 180).

Though Malay could potentially have been a language of national inter-communication, it became a “a static, highly exclusionist expression of Melayu hegemony” (Leow 2016, 180). A significant moral majority continues to demonstrate a “passion for race” as proof of communal loyalties (Lim 2008, 3). As an after-effect, English-language literary works from the 1980s demonstrate a focus on the ethnic community of the author and “a noticeable withdrawal from engagement with multi-ethnic and multi-religious issues” (Ng 2019, 328).

By contrast, the re-memorialization in Evening Is the Whole Day is constructed from an important transnational locus that brings together the material contexts of the publishing industry as well as Samarasan’s racialized and diasporic belonging to her homeland. As part of a wider and more complex circuit, Samarasan’s literary representation is equated with the making of a truth-claim to a new audience about the racialized injustice encountered by Malaysian Indians throughout the years. This positioning of Samarasan and her novel as historically revisionist is also supported by the epigraphs to the novel, which provide the preliminary framing of the narrative. An extract from Waterland by Graham Swift pays tribute to an aesthetics of fragmented narrative style and the importance of prolepsis and analepsis in revealing the root causes of contemporary events through the reconstruction of the past. “History begins only at the point when thing go wrong”, the quote begins; it concludes with the wistful query “if only we could have it back. A New Beginning” (Samarasan 2008c, i). The second epigraph is an English translation from the classic Tamil love-poem cycle, the Kuruntokai, and laments how the “pain grows sharp”, while “evening is the whole day / for those without their lovers” (Samarasan 2008c, i), as a gesture of interminable and endless waiting in the twilight in a divided community. Both quotes point to the novel’s protest against the deep historical roots of racialization in Malaysian history, and the ongoing, undisrupted racial minoritization of ethnic Indians. Yet equally, these epigraphs establish an affiliation with a wider tradition of contemporary letters, of which Swift is a representative, and to which classical Tamil poetry belongs via translation, and so indicate how Evening Is the Whole Day adopts a transnational address that transcends the hegemonic discourse of race and public ethno-nationalism in Malaysia’s public arena.

The transnational address of Evening is the Whole Day is also present in several stylistic allusions that pay homage to the broader anglophone canon, while marshalling these literary techniques in service of an intergenerational tale about the Rajasekharans during the decades immediately before and after Malaysia’s independence in 1957. In its account of the Tamil immigrant’s in-journey and the loss of cultural identity amidst independent Malaysia’s first years of economic development, Samarasan’s novel features subject matter that has already been depicted in K.S. Maniam’s classic trilogy of The Return (1981), In a Far Country (1993), and Between Lives (2003). In contrast to Maniam’s work, however, Evening Is the Whole Day is made accessible to a broader audience through strikingly recognizable tropes, with the Big House of the Rajasekharans a parallel to the Caribbean plantation house and the English country mansion. Individual chapter titles, such as “After Great Expectations”, situate class concerns of marrying-up in Samarasan’s novel within a Dickensian frame, while “What Aasha Saw” alludes to Henry James’s What Maisie Knew, as a further intertext featuring a precocious girl growing up amidst her parents’ failing marriage. In the Fiction Writers Review interview (Samarasan 2008d), Midnight’s Children is explicitly cited as a “big influence” (n.p.), and Samarasan taps into the earlier work’s hyperbolic depiction of a nation’s birth amidst a dazzlingly erratic chronology, to make a claim to representing Malaysia’s birth not as the moment of political independence in 1957, but as the crisis of May 13, 1969, where aspirations to racial equality were stifled.

In the chapter “Power Struggles”, the events of that evening are depicted as equivalent to the birth of Malaysia as a nation defined by racial grievance. During the violence, Suresh, the second child of the Rajasekharans, is born “wet with the brave blood of life and hope, while so near and yet so far away the heroes of Malay Land soared through the skies, soaked with a seamier blood” (Samarasan 2008c, 133), that of the victims, both Chinese and Indian, of ongoing racial clashes in the streets. When Suresh’s mother goes into labour on “that night of bloodshed and bedlam, of dreams sent up in flames and ideals abandoned in dirty back alleys” (133), her sister and brother-in-law attempt to take her to the hospital in a taxi, but their way is blocked by armed Malay rioters. They are spared from further violence because they are “Orang Keling” and “mere bloody Indians” (132) rather than the Chinese, who are being targeted that night. The boy is born in the back seat of the car, in full view of a disintegrating society where “Rumour and Fact fornicated openly” (127). Unlike Rushdie’s Saleem Sinai, who was born at the stroke of midnight when India became independent, and whose mistaken identity is an occasion to trace the “excess of intertwined lives events miracles places rumours” (Rushdie 2005, 9) and the “consumed multitudes” (9) celebrated as part of the India’s multifarious genealogies, Suresh was born into his racialized identity as a Malaysian Indian, which is inscribed through an act of fearful submission to Malay ethno-nationalism.

By orienting a famously allegorical scene away from Midnight’s Children towards a depiction of the injurious racial grievances of Malaysian Indians, Evening Is the Whole Day can be usefully considered a form of multidirectional memory constructed from Samarasan’s transnational position, which exists in competition and dialogue with public discourses on race within Malaysia’s national space. Though originally theorized by Michael Rothberg (2009) in the context of the Holocaust, multidirectional memory is “subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing; as productive and not privative” (3), and builds on Jan Assman and John Czaplicka’s (1995, 129) distinction between two types of cultural memory, the fluidity and intimacy of everyday communicative memory and the external objectification of collective memory in its temporal distance. As discussed above, a scene filled with the bloodied screams of rioters and the ventriloquizing of the crudest anti-bumiputera views in phrases such as “No means please shaddup your mouth” and “Go back where you came from” (Samarasan 2008c, 134) is powerfully vivid, and therefore can be seen as exercising the immediacy of communicative memory through stylistic techniques. The literary text, therefore, becomes a site of vibrant re-memorialization, with the potential to intervene in collective memory and to re-imagine the enunciative frame of race as public memory in Malaysia.

The extended work of multidirectional memory can also be perceived in the postscripts to the novel’s main narrative, which comprise an interview with the author titled “Only the Past Has It” (Samarasan 2008a) and a reflective essay by Samarasan (2008b) herself on contemporary Malaysia, “The Deepest Wounds”. The pernicious effects of racial discourse in Malaysia are again brought to the attention of an international audience by these paratexts that question the dominance of Malay interests. Reminiscent of the supplementary content of many novels that ply the international arena, these paratexts frame the text for readers less familiar with Malaysia and set out not only the basics of Malaysian culture and history, but also a clear oppositional stance to general attitudes towards race in Malaysia, which Samarasan terms “legalized racism” (2008b, 15). It is impossible for an anglophone reader experiencing Malaysian writing for the first time to read the novel apolitically, without a sense of the country’s troubled inheritance of racial identities, including those that minoritize the Indian community, and yet it is worth querying further if the transnational locus from which Samarasan writes might lead to certain distortions of historical understanding that hinder a more transformative critique of race.

In “The Deepest Wounds”, Samarasan singles out “apathy” as her “country’s most insidious epidemic” (2008b, 12) – the metaphor of disease underscoring her accusation. She draws a connection between the materialism and self-absorption of Malaysia in the 1980s and the structure of racial difference inaugurated by the 1969 riots. Traced across the generations, the fate of the Rajasekharan family is a microcosm of events in the nation. “Quietly, at home”, Samarasan elaborates,

we teach our children that we have to step on others to rise, the Malays on the Indians and Chinese, the Chinese on the Indians, and the Indians, to whom is left the smallest piece of the pie, even on each other. (2008b, 15)

However, against the gradual emergence of Malaysia’s racialized appellations, it appears that Samarasan has inherited, and is in turn reinforcing, the homogenized racial identities which have been perpetuated since the Alliance of 1953. In the lead-up to independence in 1957, racialized political parties representing the largest ethnic groups, namely the Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA) and the Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC), became part of an electoral coalition with the United Malays National Organization (UMNO). Known as the Alliance, it was an expedient bargain to ensure a political majority and has for the most part succeeded in doing so since the country’s municipal elections in 1952. Frederik Holst has discussed extensively how the Alliance resulted in a further a manifestation of homogenized “Malay”, “Chinese”, and “Indian” racial identities, which became further polarized following the May 13 incident in 1969, thus allowing the Alliance, later renamed the Barisan Nasional (BN) in 1973, to solidify its role as an arbitrator of racial relations. By viewing race relations as occurring between the ascriptive identities of “Malay”, “Chinese”, and “Indian”, and according to a rather simplified hierarchy of one racialized group trampling upon another, Samarasan’s commentary obscures the complex processes by which racialization intersected with political and economic formations of the time. Additionally, the varied composition of these racial communities is erased, and, in the course of Evening Is the Whole Day, the story of upwardly mobile Tamil immigrants, refracted by caste distinctions within their community, such as the denigration of Chellamservant for her rubber-estate origins and Amma for her dark skin (Samarasan 2008c, 91), is taken as representative of the Malaysian Indian experience without mention of other minority Indian communities such as the Gujaratis or Assamese. Ironically, Samarasan’s narrative reinforces external views on the Malaysian Indian community as Tamilian, further evinced in the novel when an overly friendly Malay man addresses young Uma in the train as “thangggachi” or Tamil for “little sister” (116).

A similarly problematic attempt at a transnational address occurs when Samarasan describes the NEP of 1970 as “apartheid with a tarted-up face” (2008b, 15), in an attempt to translate Malaysia’s racial discrimination into a larger cultural idiom. However, by comparing the NEP with apartheid in South Africa, Samarasan equates its pro-bumiputera stance with the disproportionate ownership and domination of economic and social assets by South Africa’s white minority, thus effacing earlier developments under the British administration, which had effectively kept many ethnic Malays from acquiring capital and participating in a modern industrial economy (Comber 2009, 6). A further context that would be apparent to contemporary readers is the role of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in reframing the history of apartheid’s brutal segregationist policies as part of the country’s transition to democratic constitutionalism. Beginning in 1994, the task of the Commission was to “foster and repair what its report refers to variously as ‘national memory’, ‘public memory’, and ‘social memory’ ” (Sanders 2007, 36). At the heart of the TRC process was a process of mournful witnessing and memorialization through the act of confession, as part of a larger effort to “redeem that suffering in its telling and in the contribution of that truth to the production of a new moral order” (Posel 2008, 128). As a literary text, Evening Is the Whole Day is engaged in a parallel, though not identical, effort, as an act of imaginative witnessing. The novel is an attempt to redress the grievances of the Malaysian Indian community but, unlike the TRC, offers little reconciliation by way of depicting what a more egalitarian Malaysia might be like, except in allusions to a Malaysian Malaysia, articulated through Raju’s failed political ambitions.

On the whole, Samarasan’s re-memorialization of Malaysia’s formative years through a transnational address is heavily invested in reorienting a narrative of racialized non-bumiputera exclusion towards a broader audience beyond Malaysia and as part of a longer anglophone literary tradition. Yet in facilitating the narrative’s cross-border circulation, Samarasan does simplify the complex historical origins of race and racialized hierarchies in Malaysia. Her novel paradoxically relies on race as an essentializing category while critiquing it as the cause of disempowerment for non-bumiputera in Malaysia. As a form of multidirectional memory from a transnational locus, Evening Is the Whole Day would seem to invite comparisons with global memory studies, which refuse a national methodology by questioning the “unalienable inheritance that binds groups to a particular identity fixed in the past” and recognize the generative horizontality of transnational memory production (De Cesari and Rigney 2014, 9). But in yoking the history of Malaysia to a recounting of the racialized injustice encountered by Malaysian Indians, Samarasan’s debut work ironically binds itself to race as a site of righteous redress, and to the Malaysian nation with its foreignizing discourse on the non-bumiputera.

Racialized belonging as regressive temporality

Despite the complexities of representing Malaysia’s cultural politics via a transnational address, Evening Is the Whole Day can nonetheless be read as a trenchant critique of race in Malaysia, one all the more striking when historical progress, rendered as a movement towards egalitarianism and away from the claustrophobic discourse of race, and other hegemonic identity discourses, such as class, caste, and gender, is presented as well-nigh impossible. Samarasan’s novel is distinctive for its non-chronological structuration, which shuttles between the 1960s and the 1980s as separate time periods, while the narrative progresses in a deceptive forward movement towards Uma’s departure from Malaysia for university. A transnational exit from Malaysia, as implied by the narrative’s insistence on the home country as a setting, does not mean leaving one’s origins behind, and the novel’s temporally regressive structure reflects both an indictment of Malaysia’s non-progress on issues of race, and how Samarasan’s umbilical connection to her homeland requires a sad acceptance of her racialized exclusion as a non-bumiputera. For Samarasan as a mobile Malaysian author, the outward journey from her country is negated by the all-consuming need to return, via a historically revisionist perspective, to the root causes of racial discrimination.

In a more recent interview, Samarasan speaks about her process of arriving at telling the “Now story backwards” (2018, n.p.), as alternating between two timelines would allow readers to focus on the “why and how” after hearing about the plot-ending at the start. After first learning about Paati’s death in the first chapter, readers experience the continued splicing of episodes contrasting the younger and happier Rajasekharans with their disillusioned and older selves, which results in a slow revealing of the psychological processes that have led to the entire household demonizing Chellam. At the same time, this narrative technique of juxtaposing past and present junctures from public history makes readers feel keenly how the aspirations of multiracial Malaysia have been sidelined by racist attitudes and individualistic and unprincipled ambitions. As an anti-national allegory, the novel enacts the process of false progress as a critique of Malaysia’s growing material prosperity, while Malaysian Indians, especially the displaced working classes on the rubber plantations, continue to be excluded from full participation in the Malaysian national imaginary and a more equitable distribution of wealth. The last two chapters in the novel, titled “The Golden Descent of Chellam, the Bringer of Succor” (dated chronologically before Paati’s death) and “The Glorious Ascent of Uma the Oldest-Eldest” (dated after), offer the illusion of hope by presenting characters analeptically before the tragedy, and, just as Uma is about to leave Malaysia, pitting the mythic register of these chapters against the novel’s investment in critiquing but also portraying race, class, and gender in Malaysia as deeply rooted social discourses.

While none of the novel’s characters break free from the historical events that inexorably limited and shaped their lives, much of the unwarranted violence in the novel is directed against Chellam, a term of endearment in Tamil, meaning “darling”, which serves to underscore ironically both her namelessness and the minimal affection she receives from either her drunken, exploitative father or her employer’s family at the Big House. A lower-caste servant girl from the rubber plantations who goes up to the Big House, Chellam is subsequently framed for the death of the elderly Paati, the grandmother of the house and Raju’s mother. Predictably, most of the abuse that she receives is at the hands of Raju. As soon as Aasha identifies Chellam as the cause of Paati’s death, he unleashes a vitriolic outburst, calling her a “shameless prostitute” and a “killer” (Samarasan 2008c, 163). While his character showcases the racial discrimination experienced by a Malaysian Indian despite the privileges of education and wealth, his actions foreground a further intersectional alignment of such discrimination with the way he treats a female Indian from a lower socio-economic class. Dashini Jeyathurai (2012) reads Chellam’s labouring self as also the female body exposed and abused. Her broken English and unsanitary habits, which the Rajasekharan children make fun of, are markers not merely of class and caste differences, but also of “disturbing cultural and national narratives that many wish to forget” (311). In particular, Chellam is a living embodiment of Malaysia’s failed decolonization, which has kept the economic apparatus of the British plantation system intact, forming an underclass of Indian rubber-tapper families who remain resident on these estates in a cycle of impoverishment.

The non-chronological temporality of Evening Is the Whole Day fills Chellam’s tale with added poignancy, when her return from the Big House to her abusive father is contrasted with the flashback to her hopeful arrival at a new place of work in the book’s second-last chapter. Only Aasha’s morbid and vague speculations permit the presence of “Chellam Future” as a suicide, “her eyes wild as she screams to them from her funeral pyre [ ... ] whole bitter planets orbiting at the back of her gaping mouth” (Samarasan 2008c, 9). Implausible as these fantasies may seem, such fiery and vivid imagery nonetheless expresses the injustice of omitting such narratives from Malaysia’s history. These references to ghosts in the first pages of the novel foretell the tragedies to come, while functioning as a récit to highlight the arrested futurities implied by ghosts. Their continued haunting hints at a deep mourning over the lack of political action that makes Chellam a subaltern-victim (Spivak 1988, 80) at the intersecting discourses of violence of race and class. “Life will go on as it did before Chellam ever arrived”, the omniscient narrator observes with barely concealed sarcasm, “or even better, except there’ll be new ghosts in the house” (Samarasan 2008c, 9). As a story of arrested social mobility, Chellam’s trajectory might be first understood as the tragic counterpoint to Uma’s outwards journey, except that her doomed “golden descent” into the Rajasekharan household, chronicled against Uma’s “glorious ascent”, reads as an ominous foreboding about this second, new beginning.

If there is one character who stands a chance of escaping the regressive temporality of the novel’s obsessive critique of race, it would be Uma. Before winning a scholarship to go to New York for university study, young Uma was precociously intelligent and bright-eyed for her age, her “supernal brilliance” (Samarasan 2008c, 105) capturing the attention of her parents and Paati sufficiently to distract them from their mutual animosity, so that “they all imagined exactly the same thing” (106) as they fed her with Scott’s Emulsion and lavished her with Fisher-Price toys. “They watched her grow as if she were a hero-child in a folktale” (105), which quickly turns out to be a fairy tale, when Uma turns out to be adored less for her character and talents than as war booty in the ensuing household rivalry, with her grandmother encouraging Uma to dismiss the doll-games and pretty clothes as indicative of her mother’s superficiality. This brief and transient period of hope where the Rajasekharans “wondered if they might now be an almost normal family” (105) is allegorized to the “afterglow” (106) of Malaysia’s early years as a nation. After her own father molests her in a drunken episode, which Paati witnesses but keeps silent about to protect her son above her granddaughter, Uma descends into a period of enraged muteness, playing Simon and Garfunkel on loop. Like Chellam, the forestalled temporality of Uma’s growing up has its root cause in the intersectional violence enacted as the pathological control of the female body. To escape these toxic realities of gender and class, for which the Rajasekharan household is a microcosm of the nation, Uma has no option but to escape from Malaysia.

A further effect of this continuous retreat into the past, despite Uma’s departure, is to present the notion of transnational exit as only a temporary departure from the country’s hold on one’s origins. Uma never writes back to her family, and the only scenes that depict her newfound freedom in America are present in the narrative through Raju’s imaginary tales about his eldest daughter and the fantasies of Aasha, his youngest child, who is pining for Uma’s affection. The closing pages of the novel feature Raju in the home of his Chinese mistress and surrounded by his mixed-race children, where he dreams out loud about the “Ghost of Uma Future” in a country where “you can go there a nobody, a no-name orphan, and tomorrow find yourself a United States senator” (Samarasan 2008c, 339). The visual fantasy of Uma striding down New York’s pavements in a stylish trench coat embodies Raju’s own deep desire to reinvent himself outside race as a historically entrenched category. This unrealistic aspiration is described further as a fairy-tale “Happily Ever After in which Appa’s Chindian children, and his awestruck mistress, and Appa himself, can believe” (339). Likewise, Aasha’s fantasies about her sister’s new life are equally nebulous and function as an intense envisioning of life outside Malaysia’s restrictive subject positions for a Malaysian Indian woman. “With a psychic’s clarity”, Aasha sees how the “Ghost of Uma Future” will be “many different someone elses” including Uma as “an American girl buying hot dogs from a stand” (326). Dressed, like any other girl, according to the changing seasons in New York, “her head [is] held high, because emptied of old faces, it’s lighter than anyone else’s” (326). These visions haunt a novel exclusively anchored in Malaysia’s historical chronotope, which Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) defines as an organizing centre “for the fundamental narrative events of the novel” (57), and convey a strong yearning for an identity free from the historical inheritance of racialized categories – a yearning that is never fulfilled, though amply expressed through Aasha’s imagination. With neither Uma nor Chellam able to transcend their beginnings, Evening Is the Whole Day in its regressive temporality rejects the possibility of growth or change, and, by extension, the viability of an alternative future.

Conclusion

As Samarasan herself says in an interview, there was never “a substantial post-Malaysia section” (Samarasan 2008d; emphasis in original). Though her text may be seen as an example of the Malaysian novel as “a uniquely disembedded literary form” (Holden 2012, 52) that is easily transported across geographies, Evening Is the Whole Day demonstrates how a literary work produced on the transnational circuit, and stylistically shaped by its transnational address of a broader audience, can remain resolutely situated in the cultural politics of an author’s origin. In large part this is due to the nature of Samarasan’s re-memorialization of the racial discrimination faced by Malaysian Indians as an unresolved and ongoing grievance, which in turn highlights how her diasporic relationship to her homeland remains racialized according to Malaysia’s historical formations.

While Samarasan’s debut novel effects a powerful critique of the racialized exclusion of non-bumiputera, its transnational re-memorialization may not fully depict the complex origins of race as a contemporary social formation in Malaysia, or the varied composition of the Malaysian Indian community. By favouring an idiom of protest that circulates beyond Malaysia, Evening Is the Whole Day is indelibly shaped by Samarasan’s transnational leave-taking from her homeland as a non-bumiputera excluded from full participation in the national imagination, and who remains Malaysian through her narrative’s continual return to the historical roots of such exclusion.

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Ann Ang

Ann Ang is a DPhil candidate in English at Wadham College, University of Oxford and researches contemporary anglophone writing from India, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore. She is interested in the evolution of English(es), narrative structures, and the theorizing of world literature(s). Her articles and reviews have previously appeared in New Mandala, the Oxford Comparative Criticism & Translation Review and Pedagogies: An International Journal, with a chapter forthcoming in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies.