In this series of articles, we are exploring how national events have influenced

Malaysian novels in English.

We begin our literary excursion with Lloyd Fernandos Scorpion Orchid. First published in
1976 and republished a few times since, the novel is the subject of numerous reviews
and scholarly essays.
The story is set in Singapore in the 1950s during a time of political unrest. The main
characters are university students Sabran, Guan Kheng, Santinathan and Peter
DAlmeida. They all share a prostitute by the name of Sally, whom they assume to be
Chinese but later learn is Malay, her real name being Salmah.
When the social unrest erupts into violence, Peter is assaulted by a group of strangers in
what he claims is a racially motivated attack and, in a separate incident, Sally is raped
by a multiracial gang. From then on, interpersonal relationships break down.
Overcome by doubt, mistrust, and despair, all five characters become increasingly
conscious of their ethnic differences and eventually retreat one by one to their
individual ethnic comfort zones.
Clustered round the five main characters are several other characters, which space does
not allow us to discuss. The most important one is the enigmatic Tok Said, a shaman-like
personage who makes the direst predictions about the countrys fate but whom we
never see or hear directly. We only know about him through the characters who believe
they have met him, but their accounts of the encounters suggest that each has seen a
different person.
While the storyline is straightforward, the narrative style and structure are confusing.
The disjointed narrative, a perplexing stream-of-consciousness passage, and numerous
interpolations of excerpts from historical texts such as Sejarah Melayu and Hikayat
Hang Tuah contribute to the novels inaccessibility both to read and to understand.
The only way to make sense of it is to unravel the narrative threads of the tangled knot
one by one.
image: http://www1.star2.com/wp-
content/uploads/2017/04/str2_guatwrite02_sharmilla_1.jpg
Lloyd Fernando, author of Scorpion Orchid. Filepic
The unravelling cannot begin, however, until one asks the right questions, and whether
one asks the questions depends on how clearly one perceives reality.
Take the case of Santinathan, a highly intelligent young man with some university
education who manages to get himself expelled, finds work as a dockyard labourer and
finally ends up in a rubber plantation, thus fitting neatly into the stereotype of the
Indian. If you accept that stereotype, you will not see the thread.
But if it should strike you as odd because, realistically, in 1950s Singapore (and even
today) such a person would have had no difficulty finding an administrative position
anywhere, you will have found a crucial thread. This thread will lead you to the stream-
of-consciousness passage, which, when correctly deciphered, will reveal that
Santinathans working as a dockyard labourer is a camouflaging tactic to evade his
pursuers (real or imagined) who he believes are out to kill him for having had an illicit
liaison with a Malay widow and, when found out, fleeing from enforced circumcision.
The Santinathan thread and the threads of the other inter-ethnic affairs (Ellman and
Neela, Guan Kheng and Sally) constitute an examination of a major issue among the
English-educated minorities in post-1969 Malaysia: whether to comply with the demand
for cultural conformity in return for acceptance. The mens ruminations concerning their
reluctance to marry their lovers evoke the question, Do we resist conformity because
we fear the otherness of the outsider or because we fear losing our privileged status as
insiders in our own communities?

image: http://www1.star2.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/str2_guatwrite02_sharmilla_2.jpg

The womens actions, on the other hand, offer

a solution; they overturn the conventional insider-outsider power structure by rejecting their
faithless lovers. The episode where Sally rejects Sabrans big-brotherly offer of help and
reminds him that his English education has made him irrelevant in the world of the rural Malay
is the intra-ethnic, inter-class version of this act of self-empowerment.
Related to this exploration of insider-outsider power structures and their reversals is the
novels discourse on the centre-periphery structure of the colonial mindset: its origin
and construction by the centre, and its perpetuation through the complicity of those on
the periphery. To understand the complexity of this discourse, the reader has to be
perspicacious enough to question the truth of Peters claim that his assailants are
racially motivated as well as the true nature of Tok Saids existence. These two threads
converge on the novels core message, implied in the image of the scorpion in the text
and in the title, and explicit in Sabrans observation, Looks like long after the whites go,
we will do their work for them, see with only their eyes.
Space does not allow more, but I hope I have persuaded you that Scorpion Orchid is not
your everyday novel but rather, a brilliantly conceived, intricately-wrought literary
puzzle that rewards its solver with multiple levels of meaning and ways of looking at
national issues.
Perhaps its most valuable gift to the nation-building effort is that by forcing the reader
to recognise and question the stereotypes pervading the fictional world, it effectively
deconstructs the readers real-world colonial mindset.

Read more at http://www.star2.com/culture/books/book-news/2017/04/23/scorpion-

orchid/#vrg6FHeEwclpFGRI.99

Lloyd Fernando Biography

Lloyd Fernando is a MALAYSIAN but he was born in Sri Lanka in 1926, and in 1938, at the
age of twelve, he migrated to Singapore with his family. This early migration across
Scorpion Orchid is a story about the ordeal of four young men, close friends in their final
year of university.The four are carefully chosen to represent the main ethnic groups in
Singapore: Santinathan is Indian, Sabran, Malay, Guan Kheng, Chinese and Peter
DAlmeida, Eurasian. Santinathan is bright, but something of a maverick. Refusing to
observe the conventions of university life by missing essay assignments and disrupting
lectures and meetings, he gets himself expelled from university and ends up as a village
schthe Indian Ocean had an enriching influence on Fernando, the writer and scholar, as it
was to plant the seeds of a transcultural, diasporic imagination in him at an impressionable
age. Life was moving along at a steady pace, and Fernando continued his schooling at St
Patricks, but the Japanese occupation of Singapore from 1943 to 1945 dealt a severe blow,
interrupting his formal schooling and, most tragically, costing his fathers life in one of the
Japanese bombing raids. Following his fathers death, Fernando started working as a trishaw
rider, construction labourer and apprentice mechanic, to support himself and the family. He
also joined the Ceylon branch of the Indian National Army, not impelled by any ideology but
out of a sheer necessity for self-sustenance.

After the war, Fernando completed his Cambridge School Certificate and embarked on a
school teaching career. In 1955, he entered the University of Singapore, graduating in 1959
with double Honours in English and Philosophy. In 1960, he joined the University of Malaya
in Kuala Lumpur as an assistant lecturer, and returned to the same post four years later,
having obtaining a Ph.D. in English from the University of Leeds, England. In 1967, he was
elevated to Professor and Head of English at the University of Malaya, posts he held until
1979. People retire at Malaysia at 55, and so when it was time for him to retire, Lloyd didnt
want to have to continue on a yearly contract, and not be certain of anything. He decided to
take up law. He went to England and studied law at City University and then at Middle
Temple, coming back with his law degrees. He joined a firm, and eventually started his own
practice here, which he continued right up to the time he had a stroke, which was in
December 1997.

Lloyd Fernandos work list

1)Scorpion Orchid 1976

The plot entwines four young men of differing ethnic make-up: Santinathan is a Tamil,
Guan Kheng aChinese, Sabran a Malay and Peter DAlmeida a Eurasian. The four of them
were former schoolmates and now attends the Singapore university, all in their third year.
The story follows them as they become embroiled with the racial riots in Singapore during
the 1950s. A distinctive feature of Scorpion Orchid lies in fourteen italicized passages of
varying length, drawn from traditional Malayan texts and interwoven into the narrative.

-Malaysian novel 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.

SETTING & THEME

Set in 1950s Singapore a time of racial tension and nationalistic uprising

Theme of national birth and the anxieties present regarding racial conflict and ethnic self
interest

SYNOPSIS

THE TEXT AS METAPHOR

Text is a metaphor for growth of a new nation The four young men gain a new awareness
of their ethnic identities as the negotiate the race riots that destroy their complacent sense
of camaraderie The new awareness is central to their transition from adolescence to adult
life Represents the Malayan society and the transition between former tolerance and
present assertiveness
Scorpion Orchid generally preserves an allegorical distance between the personal and the
political. The personal and the political develop along parallel lines and mirror one another,
and when they do intersect they remain clearly defined

CHARACTERS

Santi, a Tamil Indian, Sabran, a Malay, Guan Kheng, a Chinese, and Peter, a Eurasian.
Santinathan Indian, refuses to observe conventions of university life, gets expelled
ends up as village schoolteacher
Sabran Malay, involved in politics, gets arrested and his future prospects somewhat set
back considerably Sabran reflects on his family in the kampung (village) that has sacrificed
for his education and which exerts a strong emotional pull on him, but is in no position to
offer him either comfort or advice.
Guan Kheng Chinese, comes from wealthy family, feels betrayed by the Malays who
suddenly consider him a foreigner. Peter DAlmeida Eurasian, confused about his identity,
loses faith in new Singapore, emigrates to England after he is beaten up in a riot (comes
back at the end)
Sally uncertain ethnic background and origin, works at a hawker stall, part time
prostitute, has an ambiguous relationship with all four men involving sex, money and love,
although they pay her for sex she is treated as a friend

2)Cultures in Conflict 1986

Lloyd Fernandos essays collected in Cultures in Conflict (1986)

and essays collected by his wife Marie, after his death, in Lloyd

Fernando: A Celebration of His Life (2004). In both books, there

are revealing passages that inform about his citizenship status,

the novels theme and characters

Synopsis:
An exciting first novel set in pre-independence Singapore. Scorpion Orchid follows the lives of four
young mena Malay, an Eurasian, a Chinese and a Tamilagainst a backdrop of racial violence
and political factions struggling for dominance. Excerpts from classical Malay and colonial English
sources appear throughout the narrative, illuminating the roots and significance of this period in
history.

Praise:
Scorpion Orchid, as a first novel, is a work of rampant youth, a lyrical adventure into the pre-
independence Singapore of social quakes, student sieges and race riotsyou get the sense, not of
human characters, but of great mythic rhythms, you hear the entrancing footfall of the multicultural
legend which haunts the heart of the author.
New Straits Times

A brave book in which Lloyd Fernando has crafted an imaginary, historically well-informed
exploration of the meaning of independence for Singapore.
Asian Cultural Quarterly

Addresses the difficulties and prospects of harmonising disparate cultures in an emerging

postcolonial nation.
Asiatic