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COPYRIGHT 2002 www.wmich.edu/compdr
Identification is compensatory to division. If men were not apart from one another, there would be no need for the rhetorician to proclaim their unity.
--Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, 1969
In Singapore, the portrayal of adolescent initiation and rebellion has been closely monitored in the theater, for, unlike the rather complacent and passive students of the present who have generally experienced peace and prosperity, student groups were politically strategic during the periods of decolonization, independence, and secession in the 1950s and 1960s. The representation of youth in Singaporean theater notes its own energy and ability to destabilize society. Remarking on the state's concern about this potential unruliness, John Clammer states, "Youth are liminal, even dangerous in Singapore (especially minority youth) and as such must be heavily socialized through an over-heavy educational curriculum that creates little time for play or relaxation, collective socialisation for [majority] males through military service, gender socialisation for girls through the spread of Confucian values, and the controlled encouragement of pietistic and non-socially critical forms of religion which are thought to encourage `correct' values such as honesty, hard work and submission to the political authorities." (1)
Moreover, given its public nature, the theater itself was considered a potentially disruptive force that the government feels compelled to contain and manage by bringing it under a central cultural policy; "in the 1991 White Paper on Shared Values, it was formally co-opted as a medium for the transmission of certain ideological values and as a tool for the empowerment of political leadership. This action led to two kinds of reactions from playwrights: one that was rather reactionary and the other that tried to formulate subtle alternative narratives that would change perceived notions of the status quo." (2) Thus while in the twenty-first century Singapore sets out to be a "Renaissance City" the cultural heart of Southeast Asia, representations of students on the stage remain subject to careful scrutiny. Both Lloyd Fernando's play Scorpion Orchid (1994), based on his 1976 novel of the same name, and Robert Yeo's The Singapore Trilogy (2001) analyze and explore the unique relationship between the individual's maturation and the development of the state itself in the particular turmoil of an evolving Singaporean identity.
These plays bear some relation to the traditional European Bildungsroman or initiation novel in which the maturation of a young person is charted through the transition from the innocence of childhood to adulthood with its awareness of one's sexuality and mortality. When an individual's political initiation coincides with a similar development occurring in the state itself, the guidelines for both individual and state are being established for the first time. The adolescent character is subjected to both internal and external uncertainty that challenges all previously held values, whether native or foreign, old or new. In this kind of situation, the trauma of social chaos can cause intense emotional swings from idealism to suicidal cynicism. Personal passions and problems may be expressed in abstract terms involving wider issues of familial and social injustice. Thus the personal and political are prone to being intertwined when the adolescent is entering a volatile social environment.
In addition, postcolonial adolescents occupy a new role, not only as disillusioned rebels but also as embryonic citizens insisting on a voice and a presence in societies that traditionally acknowledged only the authority of the elders. Their pursuit of a new equality is complicated by the moral ambiguity resulting from the as yet undefined boundaries of a new community itself. This must take place in a state, "an artifact created over time by particular interest groups and used strategically to make sense of the present"--that is also "an `imagined community' in which there is a progressive integration of the population into a wider and finally totally embracing system and the idea of loyalty to this abstract and far from obvious concept has to be inculcated." (3)
In the Singaporean situation which informs Scorpion Orchid and The Singapore Trilogy, this abstraction is extreme, for not only did the state have to construct itself from a colony artificially created from a flow of immigrants instigated by the British, but also it had to loosen the ties ethnic groups maintained with their home countries to inspire a new patriotism. And like a child that suddenly finds himself or herself in an adult body, Singapore became a nation overnight. First it participated in the sustained rebellion against the British colonial government of Malaya that resulted in Malaysia's independence in 1957, and then it seceded from Malaysia in 1965. As W. E. Wilmott has written: "While other countries in Southeast Asia achieved independence in struggles that involved strong nationalist sentiment, Singapore was forced to become an independent state in the absence of any strong motivating nationalism"; thus "the state itself became the first major symbol of national identity." (4) And while the Singaporean government is suspicious of youth because of its vulnerability to the temptations of individualism--that is, favoring "Western values" over the "Asian values" that stress loyalty to communal needs determined by elders and fail to recognize the rights of youth--this simplistic duality fails to take into consideration the complexities of affiliations that might also be in conflict. Ethnic identification, intra-ethnic differentiation, class, religion, education, urban/rural status, and political division are a few of the factors impinging on the identity formation of the Singaporean adolescent in the 1950s and 1960s.
The Singaporean adolescent's initiation into adulthood is not merely a personal existential event but a symbol of the dynamics of nationalism to be exploited, sustained, and finally contained. With both being simultaneously engaged in self-definition, neither the adolescent individual nor the nascent state can provide a frame of reference for the other, and their ambivalence toward one another is particularly volatile. In his postcolonial Bildungsroman, Scorpion Orchid, Lloyd Fernando shows the friendship of four students disintegrating under the pressures of social and political unrest during Malaysia/Singapore's breaking away from the British Realty in the 1950s. The struggle violently opens up ethnic divisions in the society, mirrored on a personal level among the boys whose friendship unravels. With the dissolution of the single most pervasive authority--the British Empire--all relationships, personal and public alike, are tested and found wanting. The characters not only founder helplessly in the chaos of racial hatred and political power struggles of their own times, but Fernando situates the strife in both the local historical context of the first betrayal of the Malay rulers by the British and the global context of the Cold War.
Scorpion Orchid was one of the first Malaysian novels seriously and imaginatively to address race as the major social issue challenging Malaysia/ Singapore. Fernando states, "I believe no Malaysian writer can claim to be writing with truth if he does not carry, woven into his fiction, the reality of relationships between the races, and its unavoidable undertow of threatened violence. Malaysian writers on the whole have steered clear of race relationships. It is an area of unexpected rocks and deeps." (5) When the author rewrote the text for performance in 1994-95, in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur respectively, however, he recast the multiethnic group of students and subjected their personal and political rites of passage to the eyes of another generation.
Likewise, Robert Yeo's...
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