Ang, Ann Su Lee

Preeta Samarasan’s Evening Is the Whole Day (2008) traces the Rajasekharans’ family history over three generations and re-memorializes the racial riots of May 13, 1969 from a Malaysian Indian perspective. Compared to an earlier phase of memorialization in Malaysia’s national discourse about racial and cultural identity, the novel engages in the process of re-memorialization from a transnational locus, that brings together the material contexts of the Anglo American publishing industry as well as Samarasan’s racialized belonging to her homeland as a mobile Malaysian. This doubly transnational frame is defined by a strong sense of injustice from a revisionist perspective, one that obscures the complex history behind Malaysia’s public discourse on race and reproduces the essentialism of racial categories. The novel’s regressive temporality is also a critique of Malaysia’s non-progression on issues of race, as much as it forecloses other ways of rethinking racialization in Malaysia.

This article discusses the operation of memory as an effect of narrative structure in The Gift of Rain, with a particular focus on the spatial and temporal mobility of narratorial perspective. Tan’s novel is situated within Malaysian writing in English, a body of minor literature in a minority language amid the country’s promotion of Bahasa as the linguistic medium for a national literature, alongside the attendant racialization of language. However, the status of The Gift of Rain as a world Anglophone novel, which circulates transnationally while depicting trans-temporal and cross-spatial trajectories, imaginatively inscribes Malaysia with a more multifarious assemblage of its cultural origins through the hybridity and queer temporality of its protagonist. Further temporal and spatial mobilities emerge in the dynamic relationship between the novel’s frame and inner narratives, where the reading experience is akin to memory processes. The veracity of fiction as memory intervenes into historical inscription and so resists the pervasive ethno-nationalism that limits cultural discourse in Malaysia.