The Empire writes back

Shirley Geok Lin-Lim is one of the featured writers in the George Town Literary Festival to be held next week in the historic town of Penang, in Malaysia, from Nov. 27 to 29. I am lucky to have been invited to go there, courtesy of the University of Nottingham, which has a campus in Kuala Lumpur.

“Tongue and Root” is the title of an essay by this Chinese Malaysian writer, and it is appended to her collection of prize-winning poems entitled Monsoon History. Born in Malacca of Chinese immigrants, Lin-Lim learned English in school, took her Ph.D. in the United States, and decided to stay there when Bahasa Malaysia became the dominant language in her homeland. It was also a time when the Bumiputra (the sons of the soil), which means the Malays in the rural heartland – were given benefits and privileges that would make them catch up with the economic and social standing of the richer Chinese Malaysians.

Thus, she became a hyphenated writer: a peranakan Chinese-Malaysian-American, feminist writer of postcolonial texts, growing up speaking in Chinese but later writing in English. She descends directly from the line started by Maxine Hong Kingston, whose The Woman Warrior, published in 1975, kicked open the door of Asian-American writing in English to the world.

She also belongs to the illustrious company of non-native speakers of English who – by dint of hard work, if not the brilliance of their genius – produced some of the most enduring works in world literature. Among these were Joseph Conrad (The Heart of Darkness), Isak Dinesen (Seven Gothic Tales), Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita), Jamaica Kincaid (Lucy), and Junot Diaz.

What about the kind of English they spoke, if not pinned down in their books? Generally, it was a melodious and lyrical kind of English. Because transplanted from the soil of a non-English or American imagination, the prose is luxuriant, colorful, and even strange. The grammar is perfect, but the rhythms glide and roll and fly, as if to capture the tropical weather, or the baroque tradition, from which the writers sprang.

In the case of Geon lin-Lim, she says that “English is my calling. I make my living teaching it to native speakers, I clean up the grammar of English professors, I dream in its rhythms, and I lose myself for whole hours and days in its words, its syntaxes, its motions and its muscled ideas. Reading and writing it is the closest experience I have ever had to feeling infinity in my presence.”

Her poems show this creative tension between past and present, between words and worlds. One of the poems is called “Modern Secrets.” It sounds like a confessional poem.

“Last night I dreamt in Chinese. / Eating Yankee shredded wheat/ I said it in English/ To a friend who answered/ In monosyllables: / All of which I understood. / The dream shrank to its fiction. / I had understood its end/ Many years ago. The sallow child/ Ate rice from its rice bowl/ And hides still in the cupboard/ With the china and tea leaves.”

Thus, even if the persona already lives in the West and breathes the English language, the native language flows like blood inside her. Ancient societies consult the configuration of tea leaves in the bottom of their cups to divine what the future might be. What would the future hold for our persona, who exemplifies the 21st-century person inhabiting one and many worlds, all at the same time?

A sharper protest poem is found in “I Defy You,” where the poet erects a brick of reality as counterpoint to the world of the Western imagination, as exemplified by the poet Wallace Stevens. Stevens, whose day job was as a Vice-President of an insurance company, wrote cerebral poems that looked like detective stories that the readers had to unravel.

Ranged against Stevens’ “exquisite truth” is the truth of the developing world, out there, like grainy black-and-white photographs: the young Cambodian whose father drowned in the ocean while fleeing the Khmer Rouge; a woman raped by soldiers; the poor men and women of Africa skittering on the TV screen. In the end, our poet calls Stevens a mere “American fiction.

And yet, she continues to write in English, publishing a well-received book of nonfiction, a collection of short stories, as well as a first novel, aside from her fountains of poems collected in several books. Shirley Geok-lin Lim says that the English-language user “is grafting himself not only to a tree of language but to a larger history of human development. English is no longer that Anglo-Saxon-based speech of a few million people living on a small northern island off the Atlantic Ocean . . . . it is, factually, a global language, the first of its kind; serving more than the needs of empire, unlike Latin; more than the prestige of the originating nation.

“Right now, it serves the needs of every human being whose understanding and imagination would overlap tribal and national boundaries. The student in Beijing who practices her English with tapes imported from Ohio; the Nigerian who studies for his O levels in his village school; the Indian journalist who writes his copy in English while he interviews in Marathi; to these and many more, the English language is the means by which they communicate as a species. Independent nations today no longer see English as a tool of western imperialism, but as a medium for trans-national speech communications.”

Thus, non-Anglo American writers now who are using English look at it as the “language of their blood,” as Dr. Gemino H. Abad would put it. Or as National Artist Jose Garcia Villa (Doveglion) said: “Have come, am here.” That grand announcement is as real now as it was, when Garcia Villa first pronounced it magisterially, more than half a century ago. The empire, as one writer puts it, has written back – and how!

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