Jamie S. Scott’s assertion that “every literary history includes a tradition of religious writings” seems especially relevant to anglophone Malaysian fiction.¹ Although the phrase “religious writings” is inaccurate in this context, it is undeniable that despite its relatively recent history, Malaysian fiction written in English has always gestured towards religion or the religious. As such, I share Chelva Kanaganayakam’s comment that even though “religion does not permeate the work of Malaysian writers … it remains a constitutive aspect of their work and undergirds the social and cultural life of the fictional characters they create”,² although I disagree somewhat with the...

This chapter is interested in the religious dimensions of Fernando’s two novels, Scorpion Orchid (1976) and Green Is the Colour (1993) — an area that features prominently in his narratives but has been neglected by scholarship which tends to emphasize his enquiry into the notions of nationalism and belonging.¹ Fernando’s writings, in my view, promote a form of religiosity that confounds the ideological imperatives that he sees as inherent in religions which become secularized and which subsequently mobilize division and suspicion. Fernando sees in religion a potentially forging element that encourages friendship and unity without sacrificing differences, in a way Emmanuel...

If Fernando’s Green Is the Colour may be considered as illuminative of the dangers of the Islamization of the country in the 1970s and 80s (and to a significant extent, even into the 90s), Lee Kok Liang, especially in his novel Flowers in the Sky (1981), emphasizes the religiosity of everyday life amongst non-Muslims to subtly, perhaps, demonstrate the incompatibility of the dakwah (proselytizing) rhetoric with immediate realities amongst Malaysians. As the two main characters in this novel are explicitly a Buddhist monk and a Christian doctor, religion plays either a direct or oblique role in the story.¹ It is...

Fernando’s novels and to a lesser extent Lee’s works portray the difficulties in managing multireligiosity in everyday life. They identify and illuminate problem areas, and provide insightful observations on how religiosity is problematically embodied and practised, especially because religion in Malaysia is also heavily invested with racial and political overtones. Nevertheless, as the narratives discussed in the last two chapters demonstrate, camaraderie can be derived at individual, intimate levels prompted by values such as kindness and inclusiveness which are inherent in all great religions when they are divested of the extraneous baggage of politics and race. This fostering of friendship...

Technically, Shirley Geok-lin Lim is no longer a Malaysian writer if “Malaysian” is to be understood as a designation of citizenship. Immigrating to the United States in 1969, she has since become a professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and is more familiarly known to the literary world as an Asian-American critic and writer. Yet, when considering her oeuvre, it becomes significant that while her critical musings reflect her “second life” as an immigrant whose feminist sentiments have gained sophistication through encounters with “women of all colors” so that she can now “write forward”, her...

This last chapter explores the negotiation between Islam and modernity in two narratives, specifically “Mariah” by Che Husna Azhari, and “The Neighbours” by Karim Raslan. In the former, Islam is metonymically represented by the practice of polygamy, while homosexuality is invoked in the latter as a narrative pretext to eloquently stage Islamic liberalism. That both stories need to employ irony to disguise their criticism of the status quo, however, also implies the difficult relationship between a more modern and liberal perspective on Islam which these writers attempt to formulate, and a persistent conservatism that is still rife within certain powerful...

In a recent essay on the status of anglophone Malaysian literature, the writers argue that the “proliferation of Malaysian Literature in English [in the last ten years] can be seen as a way of resisting … colonialist discourse by providing a space for Malaysians to create their own constructions of themselves”.¹ They qualify this point with the example of how such writings no longer shy away from the use of local terminology (especially that pertaining to food),² and as such, are resonantly expressing the “construction of a Malaysian identity and to project a more multicultural reality”.³ This essay, I suspect,...