TANAH AIR, WHERE THE SAND MEETS THE SEA: THE MODERN MALAY WOMAN IN SINGAPORE ENGLISH LANGUAGE THEATRE

Abstract

The Modern Malay Woman (MMW), in both her real and theatrical manifestations, is caught in a triple bind between modernity, Malayness, and femininity, limiting the spaces she can call home. She seeks refuge in pelagic rather than terrestrial ‘homes’ but in these unstable ‘homes' which are undermined by their own fluidity, what modes of agency avail themselves to the MMW in her bid to elude obsolescence despite her peripherality? I first examine the MMW’s alienation from her racial and national histories, reading her as a figure of Spivak’s silenced subaltern. Perceiving a decline in Malay society, the MMW may appropriate foreign ideals and aesthetics, but it does little to stabilise her personal identity, disoriented further by an assertive but hollow national identity. Next, I analyse how, as suggested by Balme, syncretisation functions as a form of indigenous resistance, and how the play-text, exemplifying Bakhtinian heteroglossia in its mixing of linguistic registers and performance modes, resists the MMW’s assimilation into cultural hegemony, as represented by Anglophonic theatrical conventions. By deploying multilingualism and interweaving the performance of indigenous mythologies and cultural rituals, the syncretic play-text bridges subaltern and normative narratives. Lastly, I trace how the MMW’s commitment to mobility within an abstraction of Homi Bhabha’s Thirdspace pluralises the modernities she can access, and to which her emancipatory possibilities are tied. Within the theatrical (Third)space, her fragmented histories are reconstituted into islands that must be traced together to form a coherent identity. The intrusion of the native into the imaginative space of the nation is enabled by the openness of the dialogical theatrical (Third)space, as seen in the river/sea leitmotifs. Overall, I conclude that the (re)constitution of the MMW encourages archipelagic modes of thought, which enables the pluralisation of possible formulations of the MMW.