Allegorical and Parabolic: Sinophone Malaysian Literary Community in the 1980s Revisited

Allegorical and Parabolic: Sinophone Malaysian Literary Community in the 1980s Revisited

The 1980s for Malaysia were a decade of social and political turbulence. In 1981, Mahathir Mohamad became the fourth prime minister, marking the beginning of “the Era of Mahathir,” a term I would later use in a conference paper, in Chinese, entitled “Chen Keong Wah, a Lyric Poet in the Era of Mahathir.” But in 1988 UMNO, the ruling political party he led, was declared illegal by the court in the aftermath of a party crisis, though he quickly formed a new UMNO. A year before, six months after the country's constitutional crisis, Mahathir had ordered the notorious Operasi Lalang (the Lalang Grass Operation), arresting more than a hundred opposition activists and dissidents. The decade of the 1980s was ended with the signing of a peace agreement between the Communist Party of Malaya and both governments across the Malaysia-Thailand border, bringing the underground military struggle movement of the Communist Party to a historical end. It is with this historical-contextual background of Malaysia of the 1980s in mind that I revisit the Sinophone Malaysian literary community (hereafter SMLC) of those turbulent years. In my journey to revisit the SMLC, I also ponder the following three questions: What is the significance of revisiting such an era? What is the significance of revisiting the SMLC of that era? What issues are raised in Sinophone Malaysian literary production of the era? A way of answering these questions is to revisit/reread a text by the Sinophone Malaysian short story writer Xiao Hei (literally “Little Black,” penname of Tan Kee Keat). A revisit always leads to other revisits.