Thumboo, E. “The Role of Writers in a Multi-Racial Society” in Singapore Writing, ed. Chandran Nair. Singapore: Woodrose Publications, 1977: 5 13. Paper presented at the Seminar on Tamil Language & Literature in Singapore

The Role of Writers in a Multi-Racial Society

What we are to consider is sharply focused by 'role'and 'multi-racial society'which seem unlikely neighbours. But their mutual re1evance ought to strike us immediately. That there are those who would doubt the value evoked ought to warn us of how thinking about the place and the purpose of serious literature and the role of the writer varies. There is truth in the claim that a society gets the literature it deserves; there is stronger claim for it to get a literature it needs. Societies differ. Consequently literatures differ and, by implication, the role of writers. Moreover the role of writers does not remain fixed when a single literary tradition is seen as a whole: movements emerge and decline, the thrust and emphasis of creativeness shift from genre to yielding of narrative of poetry to fiction. Clearly the links and society - which alter constantly - are immemorial and deep. Master works such as the Oedipus cycle by Sophocles, The Bagavad Gita, The Divine Comedy, The Analects, continue to instruct and shape sensibilities. In meeting the contemporary needs of their time in the way they did, they managed to embody permanent insights into the human spirit. When Sophocles took the cycle in hand it was already old. Yet it is the sensitive potency of his treatment that left to posterity a durable account of human frailty, stubbornness of character interfering with decency, love that survives unreasonable authority all of which take a family to so total a destruction. In India the Mahabarata, Ramayana and the Gita remain common possessions and are among the chief sources of moral instruction of the molt delicate, subtle kind. The morality is embodied in leading characters and when they act, confront each other, or debate the nature of duty, as Krishna and Aijuna do, the notions of right and wrong, good and evil are dramatised with the added power that great literature ensures.

Only writers of the first rank can hope to muster the power comparable to that found in these massive, relatively anonymous classics: Shakespeare, Kalidasa, Chun Yuan, Cervantes, Dante are among the select. Apart from their individual gifts, their greatness lies in how uniquely they addressed themselves, to certain central issues of their time, putting them among the makers of tradition, adding to it, reiterating the totality of the educative force and literature.
But each belongs to a specific literary tradition marked by a unique insistence and direction. For we are constantly reminded that to a considerab1e writer is influenced by the tradition which nurtures him, especially the cumulative forces which have emerged and played themselves out. Innovations in the idiom, critical practice and other matters of direct concern to him are absorbed into general literary consciousness, in the course of which, and among other things, conceptions of the writers'role inevitably undergo change.

Before the world turned global village through mass media and easy travel, a language and its supporting, nourishing culture, expanded, refined and established themselves in comparative isolation. This provided certain permanent advantages, notably the degree to which the poet - and musician, sculptor, painter, architect - shared a language and a medium whose content and general behaviour understood with various degrees of intimacy by his contemporary and later audiences. This consequent homogeneity works in a cru y for the writer, the creator, as it allows him to assume with confidence that, however individual his vision, the pitch of his medium, they remain accessible. For instance, a writer could freely exploit the symbolism inherent in language, shape fresh metaphors, assemble new images, turn his argument upon irony, create a powerful poem out of questions - as Blake did in 'The Tyger'- pun and other sources of connotative and denotative meaning. Secondly, the genres he employs have evolved within the language. Each creates certain expectations where they served a special purpose as in the case of the sonnet. Readers approach with the right expectations. There are qualitative differences in our responses to Peking and popular opera in the Chinese vernaculars. The Bangasawan catered for a certain taste. It is the same with poems, plays and novels. The broad conventions governing a genre are understood and the writers'achievement judged by how he has exploited the opportunities offered. Where a genre is imported - the haiku in English for instance - it gets domesticated. And the domestication is somewhat smoother because the corpus of poetry, the existing idiom, offers security so that the new arrival belongs to a phase in the continuing attempts to discover fresh means to cope with the materials of literature, adding thereby to the structural and technical assets of tradition.

Apart from the comfort and immediacy of a shared language there is the vital fact that in a homogeneous society with a single dominant literary tradition, the writer and his audience have been nurtured on the same value-system consisting of particular political, social, religious, aesthetic determinants that give a society and its members their specific character. We recognise this in phrases as 'The Protestant Work Ethic', 'the soft Asian', 'bolce far nlente'or when we judge the Boers in South Africa racist. That we feel in a position to say so is attributable to particular determinants. But more to the point, those to whom we apply such phrases are so described because they became thus in relative isolation i.e. before they industrialised, before the growth of large scale international contacts, the emergence of the mass media i.e. those factors which encourage large scale external influences. They changed, evolved gradually, responding to and contained by the inner dynamics of their life-style. Of course the mass media enables the rapid injection of new determinants: the rise of Nazism and other instances of forcible, traumatic remodelling of a people provide ready examples.

Viewed in this briefly sketched context, a language and its literature achieve their full stretch in relative isolation, creating in the course of time a well-established literary tradition. Consider what has been said about the role, the function, the place of English poetry:
Aristotle:
Poetry is more philosophical and of higher value than history
Ben Jonson:
The study of it (if we trust Aristotle) offers to mankind a certain rule, and pattern of living well, and happily; disposing us to all civil offices of society.
Francis Bacon:
Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.
John Dryden:
Delight is the chief, if not the only, end of poesy: instruction can be admitted but in the second place; for poesy only instructs as it delights.
Samuel Johnson:
The business a poet, said Imalc, is to examine, not the individual but the species; to remark general properties and large appearance. He does not number the streaks of the tulip.
William Cowper:
My sole drift is to be useful: a point which, however, I know I should in vain aim at, unless I could be likewise entertaining.
William Wordsworth:
Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the counterpart of all Science.
P.B. Shelley:
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
The functions of the poetical faculty are twofold: by one it creates new materials of knowledge, and power, and pleasure; by the other it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and the good.
Matthew Arnold:
More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.
Thomas Hardy:
Poetry is emotion put into measure.
T.S. Eliot:
Perfection of form united with a significance of feeling.
W.H. Auden:
Memorable speech.
Louis MacNejce:
Poetry is a precision instrument for recoding a man's reactions to life.

You will notice a significant transfer in the emphasis after Matthew Arnold. Up to Arnold the poet saw his vocation as having - primarily social and educative responsibilities. With and after r.s. Eliot, the responsibilities are there, but, in a sense, they share attention with the poets'desire to achieve a satisfying statement. There is a turning inward, whereby individual consciousness and perception have priority over other considerations. I am generalising a a complex growth, but it can be said with confidence that this gradual 'interiorisation'of the poetic impulse that began its current phase with Blake, has much to do with changes in the intellectual climate of English society. The growth of psychology,, sociology, anthropology, and other related disciplines - through refinement of and additions to various ideas, some going back to early 19th century and before - assigned a new importance to the individual. It has led to an increase in the quantity of 'I'poetry, either directly expressed or disguised as persona. The contours of this development is extremely complex, but it ought to be clear that writers belonging to a well-established tradition have their function defined by the tradition. As the tradition developed the writer's role altered accordingly, gradually. The more obvious functions - the writer as entertainer, the writer as chronicler, the writer as defining the types in his society, the writer as the sensitive explainer of his society, had been issues considered simultaneously with the founding of the nation-state which is to say the various, larger infra structures which make a people a nation. Inevitably, the more obvious questions about the writers'role were pushed into the background. These changes occur in response to - at times they initiate shifts in religious, social, cultural sensibility. These shifts directly affect the whole of society. But others, less fundamental, relating to technique, idiom, genres, taste and so forth go on. If questions occur when they inspect their role today, they tend to be private, not public undertakings. They will not do what we are trying to do this morning. Fundamental excursions of the kind by Storm Jameson in 'The Writers Situation'(May 1947) are the exception, not the rule. There seems to be a general assumption that stark questions about the 'role'of the writer are out of place: they have been considered, debated, examined earlier, and therefore belong to the history of literature and not to its foreground. The writers'role is taken for granted on the strength that literature has a permanent and fairly vital place in the national life. Debate and discussion therefore touch specific issues facing the writer, issues relating on the one hand to theme and material on the other to technique. For instance, it has been rumoured for the last 30 years that the novel is dying or that the novel is dead. Novelists - and critics - have thrived on this rumour, for, in the meantime, writing goes on as those who create go about their business. In such circumstances, a well established literature, resting on a well-established society, there is no need to define the writers'role. It was the case with English literature. We can therefore understand why a contemporary writer in English is unlikely to be bothered with our topic, at least not in a form so sharply focused. It is part of the baggage of his history. But what remains surprising - and this is why I have sought to sketch a context - is how some Asians who have imbibed the springs of English literature, but who live in societies quite different from that of England, in societies which are either forming or reforming themselves, take the same superior view.
The lessons implicit in re-examining postures and positions regarding the role of the writer are not merely directed to one group. They apply to literature in other languages which have a strong and extensive literary tradition overseas. Overseas from our point of view. I mean Tamil (and other Indian languages), Chinese and to some extent Malay. Both Tamil and Chinese have a highly rich literary heritage with that in Chinese broader in scope and reach because it is a national literature. Those who write in these languages, and particularly, those who take the role of literary critics, have to realise at all times that a local literature in these languages would only thrive if they are a response to the facts of life here. And central to this realisation is the fact that the role of literature in these languages in Singapore must need differ in some ways from that elsewhere.

We come to a second set of facts affecting the role of writers considered from the perspective of today's topic. (We must assume that the role of writers in a developing society differs from that in a developed society.) There are areas which overlap - in matters of craft, for instance. But surely the role is radically different in a developing society, one which, when we look at the elements that make a modern society, has still a long way to go. There is for some, the task of reconstruction or of construction as in Africa and the West Indies. Those in the first category must manage as rapidly as possible that transition from a basically rural economy to one urbanized and, hopefully, industrialising. In the second category are nations founded substantially by migrants. The Caribs who originally inhabited the islands were wiped out over the last few centuries. Their genetical inheritance is dispersed in physical types removed from their original ethnic shape. The present dominant groups Ire Negro, Asian-Indians and some Chinese.
The chief tasks of the writer in the first category centre on the need to explain and define his society and to retrieve a sense of continuity by depicting what life was like in the recent past, to chart the phases of transition, of growth, of development. In Africa for instance, Chinua Achebe has done precisely this in Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God, No Longer At Ease, A Man of the People. Together, Achebe's novels touch on Ibo society, recounting what it was like in the late 19th century, before the white man arrived in that part of Africa (Nigeria), taking it down gradually to the point where the Country is independent and faced with very profound changes. In East Africa, James Ngugi has written three novels which form a powerful fictional statement of the historical continuity of Giku national aspirations: they show how the nationalism which developed among one tribe gradually expanded by way of the Mau Mau Movement into a national movement carrying the whole of Kenya with it. Obviously, there the role of the writer is a fairly special one, at least comparable to the role of the writer in the earlier phases of the old traditions, but now turned crucial in view of what is at stake. For instance in the structuring, identification and expansion of the various cultural, social types, which constitute the main stratifications of a society, what Achebe does recalls what Chaucer did in The Canterbury Tales. Ezeulu and Okonkwo, two memorable creations recall the 'characters'of Sir Thomis Overbury. Achebe has identified his task:
Here then is an adequate revolution for me to espouse - to help my society regain belief in itself and put away the complexes of the years Of den and self-abasement And it is essentially a question of education, in the best sense of that word. Here, I think, my aims and the deepest aspirations of my society meet
An important essay of his is entitled 'The Novelist as Teacher'.

A society of the kind in the West Indies, has both to construct and modernize. Because its people were basically migrants, the function of literature includes, inter alia, an exploitation not only of contemporary experience; but also attempts - least by those of African descent - to trace their roots. Edward Brathwaite's The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy records a journey into the African past to connect it to the present, in the hope that the present will then be better understood. Edgar Mittelholzer's Kaywana quartet fictionalises colonial history. Both writers manifest that strong desire for a sense of historical continuity'which migrant peoples have. They have responded to deep-seated needs.
Of societies falling within the two categories, the first, seek to achieve a transition, the second construction. In any event both types are in a phase of rapid change, one that is not always orderly because urgent problems demanding attention, over-tax the resources available for their solution. But the vision of a new and better world is a real and constant one. It is a vision with which writers are necessarily concerned. This ought to indicate how the role of the writer is proposed by the circumstances of the society in which he lives.

Singapore is very likely unique: ours is substantially a unique society; our people come from places with great cultural traditions. For us the whole question is made complex by a number of factors each of which has its own bearing on the role of the writer. Migrants are not concerned with literature. Their basic desire is to secure the good life for themselves and their children which is why they came. Moreover, migrants are by and large among the poorer cultural representatives of any community. They usually belong to the lower, impoverished class. Fortunately they have a respect for learning, for literature, for the upper reaches of a culture. They are aware of their importance although their respect does not always lead to an active and continuing desire for them.

Secondly, because the Singaporean has a mixed and various ethnic origin - China, India and Malaya - we are not merely a multi-racial society. We are also a multilingual society. Our life-styles differ, we speaker a number of highly developed languages. To add to our problems, we also use English. Some speak it as a first language, others as a second language. Clearly, the relationship between the languages is a very delicate one. But given our situation, given the need for economic strength, English obviously has a vital function for the technology it makes available and as a bridge language. It provides contact between the various communities, the various language groups. Given this situation, we can therefore see two basic groups of writers: those who use English and those who write in Chinese, Tamil and other Indian languages and Malay. The distinction is not a qualitative one. It is merely that those who write in English, and therefore the role of those who write in English, differs from those write in the other languages, mainly because the former can have an appeal that cuts across language barriers, cultural barriers.

I have chosen to concentrate on what I believe to be the role of writers in the other languages, not because I think those who write in English haven't a role to play, but because I have spoken about that role elsewhere. This distinction between have less importance as our society becomes actively bilingual. This will take time and of course when it comes about, presumably the role of the writer, whether he writes in English or Chinese or Tamil, will change. But in the meantime, we have to accept the fact that among those capable of creating or who are interested enough in the literature in our languages, there is a gap.

Each language has its literary tradition and the literary traditions that come with Chinese and Tamil are very powerful ones. They each have a corpus of classical as well as contemporary writing and quite naturally, the existing traditions exert a considerable influence not only on how the language is used outside the areas where the parent traditions operate, but also on the writers here. The first task is how to adapt the worldviews inherent in their language and which are transmitted by them; philosophical, social, psychological, aesthetic attitudes, the verbal habits and so forth. The literature of a language tends to project, to preserve a certain world-view which has evolved with the languages as part of its history. This world-view tends to be self-approving and can be a source of problems in a multi-racial society where there is an active desire for the formulation of a new society, in this case a Singapore society, having its own identity, evolved hopefully out of the best elements in the world-views brought by these languages. The writer who uses Tamil and Chinese therefore has to be especially aware of what is going on in Singapore towards a formation of a Singaporean identity, wards the achievement of a Singaporeanness. Each tradition has much to offer, not only of their content which is valuable enough. They are the major means for analyzing and ordering experience. For instance, the Indians are by and large tolerant. They have, comparatively speaking, a greater concern for spiritual matters. These could usefully be brought into the notion of Singapore identity, provided they are balanced and complemented by virtues such as hard work, discipline, courage and so forth.

Apart from domesticating this world-view to suit the main impulses - as far as can identify them at the moment - of Singapore life, there is of course the need to change the content of literature. After all Singapore, geographically, climatically speaking, is quite different from the general character of India and China. We do not have four seasons. Our sense of space and distance is not shaped by long rivers, vast plains or high mountains. The content of literature is drawn very much from the life around it. The character of life projected in literary traditions would differ substantially from the facts of local experience. There is as a first task-one which, I might add, has already commenced and is continuing; how to ensure that literature in the other languages get closer to the Singapore experience. This ties up with the point I made earlier about the need to create an audience. For by bringing in specifically Singapore experiences into writing, in Chinese and Tamil, there is a greater chance of developing a Singapore audience for these writings. We can then better tap the common pool of experiences shared by reader and Writer towards this specific end of creating a larger audience.

The next point relates to technique. Many of the literatures have evolved genre. I have mentioned the haiku which is specifically a Japanese achievement. There are, I am certain, other forms which could be used here, which perhaps could be used specifically to explore the Singapore experience, that is suited at the same time to a modern urban style of life. Writers should draw not only from the traditions, the literary traditions, of the language in which they write, but they should also rummage other literary traditions for suitable genre. This lies more in the when the Singapore writer is bilingual. In the meantime the individual traditions can be exploited in various ways. Both Chinese and Tamil have rich systems of symbolism that reach usefully into our psyches. Symbols of this kind, symbols which transcend the immediate and the local, can be utilised in writing, put into circulation, made available to others. And once they have been taken up and responded to, there is an additional bridge, an additional area for deep and deepening understanding. Specific techniques could be brought in. Here I can think of the Kuruntokai as one example of what could be brought in to provide a method that uses the dramatic person having a contemporary dressing.

The Kuruntokai is one of eight anthologies which help form the bulk of classical Tamil literature. It is a sequence of love poetry created by poets between the Second and Third Century B.C. It established its own convention, and within that convention, we find three major and four minor characters. The advantage of such a convention is that it is not easily exhausted. Once the status of each character is ascertained and remembered, it is what they say which matters and not the characters themselves. They become the equivalent of a person. It is what they say in individual poems which matters and at the same time, these individual poems have the advantage of belonging to an enlarging body of interconnected and mutually illuminating poetry. And that body provides a kind of resonance. The Kuruntokal offers an example, not merely of great poetry, but also the germ, the seed, for a kind of poetry that could be used to talk about the life in Singapore, both the contemporary life and the life of our forebears, of our founding fathers who came. For if we were to establish characters that are also types who represent our history, then it is possible to keep them in dialogue, use them as commentators to achieve the kind of historical exploration which Edward Brathwaite did in The Arrivants. They become sources, focal points for essential moments in our history. Each tradition has its ways of treating certain themes. English poetry, so personal and intimately revealing about love, personal agony and joy, is self- conscious about praising great men. Pyregeric or praise poems is something familiar in Tamil. Those who write in English could take a lesson here and shed some of their inhibitions, though I hope, not their judgement.

The achievement of the Kuruntokai is love poetry. But there is no reason why its technical achievement cannot be applied to a whole range of other themes. But above all what the writer should do, is deal with the fabric of the experience he finds in Singapore. It is important to be concerned about what is happening today, to put all possible skill in the treatment of ordinary themes. For the tendency to venerate a classical literature has the effect of debunking, of reducing the value of contemporary life. Classical literature, by its very status, by its very authority, tends to approve a fixed number of themes. This is something which perhaps the literary traditions tend to perpetrate, but it is something which, although we respect, we must supplement with poems, short stories, novels and plays that deal with life today as it is. The writer must persuade that the life around him is interesting. That it is capable, if well handled, of providing the kind of insight, the kind of refinement for mind and spirit, and body, capable of providing nourishment to our sensibilities in the way that the classical works do. It is here that the writer has an immediate and important role, one which all of us recognise. Quite clearly there has been a process whereby the classical inheritances have been modified, become domesticated. The process is going on, and will go on because there is always a need in some way to return to the best practices of these languages, irrespective of where they are available, in order to refurbish ourselves as writers. I am not therefore suggesting a cutting off with the main roots, the main literary roots of the languages we have. lam merely suggesting that the way we use them must be from consciousness that is specifically Singaporean.

There is of course the need to up-date idiom, making it contemporary in the way we use it. When a language travels it alters: pronunciation changes, new words are added because the language has neighbours and takes from its neighbours, it gives to its neighbours. It evolves to reflect the life here. This is something worth considering, and I am sure it has been by all who write.
I would like to round off by stressing how important it is for writers to get their works translated from Malay, Chinese and Tamil into English. This will not only serve to make their work available be their beyond their language community; it will, in due course, open possibility of the literature of each language, reflecting not merely the life of its own language community, but also the communities around them. At the moment, only English is multi-racial, multicultural, only the literature in English is so. By and large the literatures in Chinese, Tamil and Malay tend to reflect, to take their substance, from the life of their own communities. This I see as an essential development in the years to come, when the writer using Chinese, will not only be understood by the non-Chinese who perhaps has learnt Chinese as a second language, but also better understood because, in the writing by a Chinese writer, he recognises segments of the life of his own community.

One should not look too far ahead but I think one should look to a time when the writers in the various communities will write in their language of their choice but be generally understood by others. And this day will only come about if the writers in the different languages take the trouble to bring to their writing, increasingly enlarged perspectives. They may hold, perhaps they can't avoid holding, to a point of view that is individual that is structured by their experiences as either Chinese Singaporeans, or Indian Singaporeans or Malay Singaporeans. Gradually as the literature in each language enlarges its vision, its view of things to take in the whole of life in Singapore, then we would have reached a point where we have a Singapore writing, in our many languages, but nonetheless very much Singaporean.