Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T11:25:28.217Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Mobility as Memory: Refiguring Temporal and Spatial Mobility in Tan Twan Eng’s The Gift of Rain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 February 2022

Ann Ang Open the ORCID record for Ann Ang [Opens in a new window]
Ann Ang*
Affiliation:
University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
*
Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article discusses the operation of memory as an effect of narrative structure in The Gift of Rain, with a particular focus on the spatial and temporal mobility of narratorial perspective. Tan’s novel is situated within Malaysian writing in English, a body of minor literature in a minority language amid the country’s promotion of Bahasa as the linguistic medium for a national literature, alongside the attendant racialization of language. However, the status of The Gift of Rain as a world Anglophone novel, which circulates transnationally while depicting trans-temporal and cross-spatial trajectories, imaginatively inscribes Malaysia with a more multifarious assemblage of its cultural origins through the hybridity and queer temporality of its protagonist. Further temporal and spatial mobilities emerge in the dynamic relationship between the novel’s frame and inner narratives, where the reading experience is akin to memory processes. The veracity of fiction as memory intervenes into historical inscription and so resists the pervasive ethno-nationalism that limits cultural discourse in Malaysia.

Keywords

MobilitymemoryTan Twan EngMalaysiaworld Anglophone
Type
Article
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , January 2022 , pp. 26 - 41
Check for updates
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Nicole Idar, “An interview with Tan Twan Eng,” Asymptote, May 2013 (https://www.asymptotejournal.com/interview/an-interview-with-tan-twan-eng/).

2 Neumann, Birgit and Rippl, Gabriele, “Anglophone World Literatures: Introduction,” Anglia 135.1 (2011): 3.Google Scholar

3 Sam Jordinson, “Booker Club: The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng,” The Guardian Books Blog, August 31, 2007 (https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2007/aug/31/bookerclubthegiftofrainb).

4 Ed Lake, “Man Booker 2007 Prize: The Gift of Rain,” The Telegraph, August 18, 2007 (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/fictionreviews/3667300/Man-Booker-2007-Prize-The-Gift-of-Rain.html).

5 Kee, Thuan Chye, “In Search of Good Penang Fiction,” Penang Economic Monthly, May (2010): 33.Google Scholar

6 Poon, Angelia, “Transcultural Aesthetics and Postcolonial Memory: The Practices and Politics of Remembering in Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists ,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 3.2 (2016): 199.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Lim, David C. L., “Agency and the Pedagogy of Japanese Colonialism in Tan Twan Eng’s the Gift of Rain,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 52.2 (2011): 239.Google Scholar

8 Koh, Sin Yee, Race, , Education, and Citizenship: Mobile Malaysians, British Colonial Legacies, and a Culture of Migration (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 197.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Baharuddin, Shamsul Amri, “History of Identity, an Identity of a History: The Idea and Practise of ‘Malayness’ in Malaysia Reconsidered,” Contesting Malayness: Malay Identity across Boundaries, ed. Barnard, Timothy P. (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2014): 135–48.Google Scholar

10 Holst, Frederik, Ethnicization and Identity Construction in Malaysia (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2014), 33.Google Scholar

11 Gabriel, Sharmani P., “The Meaning of Race in Malaysia: Colonial, Post-Colonial and Possible New Conjunctures,” Ethnicities 15.6 (2015): 785–800.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 Leow, Rachel, Taming Babel: Language in the Making of Malaysia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 180.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 Hong, Ee Tiang, “Literature and Liberation: The Price of Freedom,” Literature and Liberation: Five Essays from Southeast Asia, ed. Thumboo, Edwin (Manila: Solidaridad Publishing House), 11–42.Google Scholar

14 Nam, Wong Phui, “Getting to Speak Without a Language,” From the Inside: Asia Pacific Literature in Englishes, eds. Thumboo, Edwin and Sayson, Rex Ian (Singapore: Ethos Books), 33–45.Google Scholar

15 Leow, Taming Babel, 180.

16 Ng, Andrew Hock Soon, “The Novel of Malaysia,” in The Novel in South and South East Asia since 1945, ed. Tickell, Alex (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 328.Google Scholar

17 Neumann and Rippl, “Anglophone World Literatures,” 3.

18 Ng, “The Novel of Malaysia,” 335.

19 Holden, Philip, “Global Malaysian Novels: Prospects and Possibilities,” Kajian Malaysia: Journal of Malaysian Studies 30 (2012): 50.Google Scholar

20 Ng, “The Novel of Malaysia,” 335.

21 Lim, David C. L., Overcoming Passion for Race in Malaysia Cultural Studies (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 Eng, Tan Twan, The Gift of Rain (Newcastle upon Tyne: Myrmidon Books, 2007), 87.Google Scholar

23 Tan, The Gift of Rain, 136.

24 Tan, The Gift of Rain, 239.

25 Cheah, Pheng, “Given Culture: Rethinking Cosmopolitan Freedom in Transnationalism,” Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, eds. Robbins, Bruce and Cheah, Pheng (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 293.Google Scholar

26 Tan, The Gift of Rain, 230.

27 Tan, The Gift of Rain, 317.

28 Quayson, Ato, “Postcolonialism and the Diasporic Imaginary,” in A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism, eds. Quayson, Ato and Daswani, Girish (Somerset: John Wiley & Sons, 2013), 148.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 Halberstam, J. Jack, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 14.Google Scholar

30 Kelly Yin Nga Tse, “Queering Imperial History: The Ethics of Reconciliation in Tan Twan Eng’s the Gift of Rain,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, June 12, 2018, 11 (https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989418769447).

31 Gui, Weihsin, National Consciousness and Literary Cosmopolitics: Postcolonial Literature in a Global Moment (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013), 193.Google Scholar

32 Tan, The Gift of Rain, 14.

33 Tan, The Gift of Rain, 320.

34 Tan, The Gift of Rain, 411.

35 Huggan, Graham, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001), 6.Google Scholar

36 Tan, The Gift of Rain, 442.

37 Nora, Pierre, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire ,” Representations 26 (1989): 22–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

38 Cheng, Edmund W., Anthony, H. F. Li, and Ma, Shu-Yun, “Resistance, Engagement, and Heritage Conservation by Voluntary Sector: The Case of Penang in Malaysia,” Modern Asian Studies 48.3 (2014): 635.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39 Tan, The Gift of Rain, 181.

40 Felman, Shoshana and Laub, Dori, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (London: Routledge, 1992), 62 Google Scholar

41 Tan, The Gift of Rain, 436.

42 Tan, The Gift of Rain, 438.

43 Tan, The Gift of Rain, 439.

44 Rothberg, Michael, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 3.Google Scholar

45 Tan, The Gift of Rain, 439–40.

46 Hirsch, Marianne, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 5.Google Scholar

47 Landsberg, Alison, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 14 Google Scholar.

48 Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, 9.

49 Milner, Anthony and Ting, Helen, “Race and Its Competing Paradigms: A Historical Review,” Transforming Malaysia: Dominant and Competing Paradigms, eds. Milner, Anthony, Embong, Abdul Rahman, and Yean, Tham Siew (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2014), 49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

50 Gabriel, Sharmani Patricia, “Translating Bangsa Malaysia,” Critical Asian Studies 43.3 (2011): 358.CrossRefGoogle Scholar