MISREMEMBERING MAY13: A GENEALOGY OF TRAUMATIC MEMORY AND POST(COLONIAL) APHASIA IN ANGLOPHONE MALAYSIAN NOVELS

Abstract

This study traces a literary genealogy of traumatic memory and aphasia across five novels: Scorpion Orchid (1976), The Search (1978), Green is the Colour (1993), Evening is the Whole Day (2008), and The Weight of Our Sky (2019). Drawing from archival research, memory studies, and theories of individual and collective trauma, it examines how May 13 has been (mis)remembered, recontextualised and disremembered over time. The post-1969 novel appropriates a diverse range of socio-aesthetic modalities in response to the irrevocable injury of May 13, while emplotting the (im)possibility of transethnic solidarities and civil repair. Despite its multidirectional memory and referential heterogeneity, the post-1969 novel is aphasic vis-à-vis the historical specificity of the male bodies—Malay and Chinese; victim and perpetrator; civilian, paramilitary, and soldier—that were so consequentially weaponised in 1969. Gender, particularly in the form of the spectacularly traumatised female body, surfaces repeatedly as a site and symptom of aphasia.