Undergraduate Thesis

As part of the Penn State Schreyer Honors College experience, I was required to complete an undergraduate thesis on my topic of interest. The thesis I wrote analyzes “Malchin Testament” by Salleh Ben Joned and “Words” by Jamal Raslan. These literary works are unique because they incorporate the Malaysian speech variation, bahasa rojak, which consists of code switching between the multitudes of languages spoken in Malaysia. Their works touch on the subject of language purity, linguistic identity, and the institutional enforcement of a national language in both a postcolonial and a contemporary perspective. Below is a short excerpt form the introduction. The complete thesis can be found in the Schreyers Honors College archive online.

For many postcolonial nations, achieving “independence” from their colonizers is not much more than a label. It is merely a milestone to show off to neighboring colonial nations of a country’s progress. The United Nations (UN) claims that they started the wave of decolonization in 1945 and calls it “the world body’s first great success” (1). The word “success” would be far from what many postcolonial citizens would describe the current political and economic state of their countries. As most nations would soon discover, decolonization is not a one-size-fits-all solution, especially when the facilitators of decolonization are themselves colonizers. In the end, many postcolonial countries become plagued with corrupt and oppressive governments that do little in regulating financial and social inequality as well as granting their citizens the right to freely express their views.

Joned and Raslan addresses some of these postcolonial concerns in the context of Malaysia through their literary works. Although written at different time periods, with Joned publishing “Malchin Testament” 30 years after Malaysia’s independence in 1957 and Raslan performing “Words” for the first time in the early 2000s, they both touch on governing bodies that are modeled after the British colonizer’s method of governance. This is exhibited mainly through the enforcement of Malay as the sole national language of Malaysia, which not only degrades the mother tongues of non-Malay citizens, but confines Malaysians to a singular language identity. The imitation of colonialism by the local government results in a negative view of institutions as repressive and is clearly identified when Joned uses tekan in “Malchin Testament” to point out the parallels between colonial and postcolonial Malaysia. For Raslan, his repetition of “the national” linguistic regulations implemented by the government reveals his critique on the many aspects of life that is dictated by the political institutions in Malaysia: from the language we speak, to our career choices, to our education. Raslan showcases educational institutions as the most crucial platforms to propagate this political agenda. He says “It’s not your fault, no it’s not/It’s the education system’s/It’s the system that educated you/Not yourself/It’s the system that did not educate you/To educate yourself.” The education system molds students to think in a narrow and specific manner, measuring their success through their ability to conform to the syllabus. The lines directly after this quote, “So you wouldn’t have known/Because you wouldn’t have known how/And now, you, are a part of that system,” ominously hints at the never ending cycle that maintains standardization and narrow mindedness in Malaysia and other postcolonial societies. Educational institutions produce students who subsequently turn into the adults that place pressures of conformity and standardization onto the younger generation. This line effectively showcases the important role education plays in ridding individuals of their freedom to construct their own identity. Raslan has personally struggled with understanding his identity throughout his youth, especially growing up as a “third culture child,” which is the reason he finds it so important to speak for and to Malaysian youths about this issue (“Word is Alive | Jamal Raslan | TEDxUMSKK”). As acknowledged in chapter 4, Raslan performed this piece at a mentoring program for Malaysian youths because he wants them to break away from the rigid expectations surrounding personal identity in Malaysia.

The anti-institutional mentality or the scepticism of authority figures is a common theme in postcolonial literature as brought to light by Dohra Ahmad in her anthology, Rotten English.As part of the introduction, Ahmad claims that “perhaps more than any single other characteristic, this literature is anti-institutional by nature” (26). Standard English itself is seen as an institutional power, and by publishing an anthology on vernacular literature, Ahmad takes on an anti-institutional stance. Ahmad references the works of Peter Carey, John Kasaipwalova, and Frances Molloy that cast the police and religious institutions in a dim light. These writers saw institutions as a repressive force on their vernaculars and in turn, their personal identity and cultural history. For these writers, using the vernacular is a way to rebel against Standard English and to assert the untameable nature of the vernacular. This is where “Malchin Testament” contributes to the broader postcolonial dialogue. Joned uses Manglish to restore the Malaysian identity, as he wrote: “our way of talking the lingo/is our way of being unik oso/it’s our great opportunity/to practice our democracy.” Joned explains that Malaysians have differentiated Manglish from Standard English in order to distance themselves from the linguistic identity that the British colonizers had pushed onto them. The last line in this quote represents Manglish as an indicator of independence and freedom from British colonization, but it also holds the subtle irony of going against Standard Malay as well.