ESSAY ... Wena POON

THE EMPIRE WRITES BACK!
WENA POON talks about growing up in Singapore, tussling with a heady brew of languages and dialects, and the bittersweet experience of inheriting a colonial language

WHEN BILL ASHCROFT, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin’s book, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (Routledge, 1989), was released, the Star Wars fan in me rejoiced at such a cool title. I take up the cry here with a confident exclamation mark, as befitting a Gen-X Singaporean Chinese author writing exclusively in the English language.

In my college days, it was fashionable for postcolonial English Literature majors to mope around debating the burden of their colonial legacy and the wretched fact that they were operating in English, the language of their imperialist masters. Everybody went around quoting Caliban in The Tempest: “You taught me language; and my profit on’t Is, I know how to curse.”

Curse? Who ever said anything about cursing? The Brits taught me English, and I have profited by writing like mad.

In case you think that I’m one of those imperialist master-worshipping, sell out, ABC (American-Born Chinese) “bananas” (white on the inside, yellow on the outside), let me clarify: the very first words I spoke in my life, according to reputable sources, were not English, but Cantonese. Like many Singaporean Chinese kids, I grew up in a heady brew of languages and dialects: Teochew with Grandma, English with Mum and Dad, Hokkien and Cantonese with assorted in-laws. Just imagine, with our multilingual heritage, what wealth we could bring to the English language when the Empire Writes Back!

It was because of my Singapore linguistic heritage that I could write these lines in English:

The word for “adopted” in Teochew was something soft, illicit, illegal even: por, the word for “carry.” Stealthily, in the dark, someone had gone out and taken baby Mina from the arms of her real mother, and carried her away. Mummy was always the first to remind visitors that Mina was not her real daughter, that she was por lai chee, she had been carried back home, and nourished, like a nestling fallen from the top of a tree. (from “The Hair Washing Girl,” a short story in Lions in Winter)

I don’t know about you, but I’m not letting people cast us in the role of that grovelling old slave, Caliban. No, we’re X-Men—culturally fluent, linguistically competent mutants created by an accident of history, back in the 19th century when the British East India Company decided to play SimCity with a sleepy Malay fishing village and stock it full of different races, then (years later) force everybody to take Cambridge GCE “O” Level exams and study Hamlet. By doing so, the British have irreversibly welded the destiny of Malaya with that of all Commonwealth nations. Politics aside, is that so bad for the writer? The Commonwealth was the original Global Village. In today’s culturally-savvy, mixed race, Obamarama world, the Commonwealth is cool.

Why waste time sitting around cursing history and feeling guilty about writing in English? To paraphrase Cecil Rhodes, I’ve won first prize in the lottery of life as a writer: I was born in an exotic region and had many languages thrust upon me. I have so much to say and so many different ways to say it. And if you as a writer believe in this empowering notion, others will follow.

The reason why we have not yet burst upon the world stage in English literature is because we do not believe we have anything interesting to say, and some of us think that our English isn’t good enough for us to be in the business of Serious Literature. It’s true that one’s English must be uncompromisingly good, but that can be acquired through passionate consumption of books from an early age (do you think I learned English in school?), but once you master English, consider how lovely it is to be able to use English to express our mad, mixed-up Malayan world. [The word “Malaya” is deliberately used here to denote the combined literary communities of Malaysia and Singapore.]

Make no mistake: the Western world looks at the colour of our skin and our geographic location and make certain assumptions about how good our English abilities are. They are ready to pigeonhole us into that big old pigeonhole called “Third World Post-Colonial World Literature,” so that nobody would ever read our work. A big-time New York publisher rejected Lions in Winter last year, and politely recommended that my work be sent to another publisher who only does “foreign literature in English translation.” Did they notice I was already writing in English?

Remember, the odds are stacked against us, but therein lies the impetus for the Empire to Write Back!

In order for us to triumph, we must broadcast our heritage. If we read, speak, live, dream in English, then let’s do it loudly and proudly. Let’s do it beautifully, sincerely, and well. We’re not sad little Calibans, struggling to express ourselves, bereft of any identity. We’re not victims, we’re mutants.

Fellow mutants, bemoan not our special powers—remember, the world adores Wizards, not Muggles. People love X-Men, not Ordinary Humans. In each of us is a linguistic and literary destiny that is waiting to be fulfilled. Are you ready to be heard?

WENA POON is a Singapore-born writer of fiction. Her first collection of stories, Lions in Winter, published by MPH Publishing in Kuala Lumpur, was longlisted for the 2008 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and shortlisted for the 2008 Singapore Literature Prize. She graduated magna cum laude in English Literature from Harvard University, obtained a degree from Harvard Law School, and practises law in the United States. She has a new collection of stories published recently, The Proper Care of Foxes (Ethos Press, 2009).

Reproduced from the Singapore Writers Festival 2009 issue of Quill magazine