Invisible manuscripts: negotiating the tension between gender-sexual pluralities and Singaporean ‘Malayness’ in the literary oeuvre of Alfian Sa’at

• Main Author: Muhammad Khaizuran Bin Rashid
• Other Authors: Lee Wei Ling, Cheryl Julia
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2023
• Subjects: Humanities
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/166327
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The construction of an individual identity necessitates the cognizance of the pluralities of the human condition, which would undoubtedly incorporate the positioning of one’s sociocultural environs, sexual orientation, among other intramural and environmental constituents. However, a commination manifests itself in the construction and propagation of mythic codifications and stratifications sanctioned by external political, social and cultural forces, of which a corollary materializes in monolithic prospects of the individual self, contained within homogenous assemblages. With regards to this thesis, such a phenomenon is particularly conspicuous in the consideration of the ‘canonical’ Malay identity, and the performance of said identity enacted by the individual subsumed within the designation ‘Malay’. It is germane for one to consider the divergent forces that are operational in this particular instance, wherein there is an invisible schism between the intramural properties (for example, one’s gender-sexual identity) contained within the Malay individual that deviate from the originary ‘essence’ of the monolithic and homogeneous singularity of the ‘canonical’ Malay identity, rendering the multiplicitous Malay individual as an undisputed ‘other’ within the orthodox Malay community: A liminal being. Such a circumstance, which I would ascribe the designation of the ‘queer-Malay quandary’, is effectively invoked in the literary domain, particularly in the oeuvre of Singaporean playwright and poet Alfian Sa’at. It is in this regard that this thesis invokes the works of Sa’at, particularly sex.violence.blood.gore (co-written with Chong Tze Chien in 1999), The Asian Boys Trilogy, Vol. 1 (2000) and his poetic anthology The Invisible Manuscript (2012) in order to assess the perennial paradox of the queer Malay individual, as well as the external forces that promulgate the monolithic homogeneity of the Malay identity. As such, this thesis would argue, firstly, that it is exactly the tension between the desire for legitimacy and the coercion to non-being that Sa’at aims to expose in his literary oeuvre, presented as a solemn declaration of the sustained liminality of the queer Malay individual confined within the uncertain coordinates of their mythic purgatory, and secondly, that Sa’at utilizes the literary craft not only as an accusatory agent in the negotiation of the queer/Malay polarity, but also as a vehicle of capitulation in the reconciliation of the aforementioned extremities, affirming the potential for the legitimacy of the queer Malay identity as a component of the ‘Malay’ canon of individual identification (whether in the destabilization and recalibration of the coordinates of the dominant sociocultural complex, or in the queer individual assuming the role of the dominant enactor in the propagation of their legitimized individual queer identities), wherein their seemingly disparate intramural properties may harmoniously coexist within a singular Malay body.