Voices and vision for a shared landscape

Abstract

It is common practice to regard Malaysian Literature in English (MLE) as writing of resistance. Its content, the use of the colonizers' language, are seen by different, and sometimes opposed groups, as constituting resistance against the British colonizers, or the metropolitan language center, or new forms of colonialism and hegemony, or against socio-political policies or as undermining governmental efforts at uniting its multicultural peoples and nation building. This paper provides the alternative view of MLE as writing for reconciliation, by Malaysians, for Malaysians. This will be done by focusing on creative fiction by established and new writers from the early 1990s to the present. These works reveal newer elements of content, emphasis, and style from a broader ethnic spread of writers. Those foreground the diversity, sometimes the differences, of our multicultural condition; they expose the realities of complex class identities and social dislocations of modern-day Malaysia. Yet, drawn from the shared history of the land, these stories are statements that interlock to present the realities of the Malaysian landscape and the collective vision of affinity to place and communities at home.