Gothic Spaces and the Tropical City: reading The Crocodile Fury, Haunting the Tiger, Life’s Mysteries

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.17.2.2018.3653

Keywords:

Literature, Malaya, Tropical Gothic, Asian Gothic, Liminal, colonialism, haunting

Abstract

Beth Yahp’s The Crocodile Fury (1992), K.S. Maniam’s Haunting the Tiger (1996), and Shirley Lim’s Life’s Mysteries (1995) articulate the ambivalence of interpreting the cultural beliefs of the Malays, Chinese, and Indians of the former Malaya with the evolving spiritual beliefs of Christianity and Catholicism influenced by British colonisation. In Beth Yahp’s The Crocodile Fury the ghosts of the colonial past vie for power with the demons of Chinese cultural beliefs in a convent situated in the liminal space between the jungle and the urban environment. The convent is a “civilised space” with the jungle as an encroaching wilderness haunted by Chinese gods and the female vampire ghost Pontianak of the Malay cultural tradition. Similarly, Maniam’s short stories in Haunting the Tiger situate the supernatural and the abject in the liminal spaces between the city and the jungle to express the metaphorical exile experienced by the Indian and Chinese diaspora in Malaysia. The trope of liminality is most evident in Shirley Lim’s short stories in Life’s Mysteries where the domestic and urban space of culture are viewed through prisms of imprisonment and disempowerment. The authors uncover the psychological and social exile experienced by colonised subjects through the gothic themes of shadows, darkness and the underworld.

Author Biography

Sathyabhama Daly, James Cook University

Sathyabhama Daly (nee Gopal) is an adjunct research fellow at the College of Arts, Education and Social Sciences at James Cook University, Australia. Her research interests are the ways in which myths, legends and fairy tales of various cultures are used by writers to engage with history and cultural identity in contemporary society. She is a founding member of Tropical Writers Inc, and is actively involved in nurturing and promoting writing and appreciation of literature and the arts in the region. Her writing interests and publications include short stories, memoirs and academic essays.

References

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Lim, S. (1995). A pot of rice. In Life’s mysteries: The best of Shirley Lim (pp.54-59). Singapore: Times Book International.

Lim, S. (1995). Journey. In Life’s mysteries: The best of Shirley Lim (pp.13-18). Singapore: Times Book International.

Lim, S. (1995). Two dreams. In Life’s mysteries: The best of Shirley Lim (pp. 38-44). Singapore: Times Book International.

Maniam, K.S. (1996). Haunting the tiger. In Haunting the tiger: Contemporary stories from Malaysia (pp. 37-46). London, England: Skoob Books Publishing.

Maniam, K.S. (1996). Terminal. In Haunting the tiger: Contemporary stories from Malaysia (pp. 1-21). London, England: Skoob Books Publishing.

Ng, A. H-S. (2006). Malaysian gothic: The motif of haunting in K.S. Maniam’s haunting the tiger and Shirley Lim’s haunting. Mosaic, 39 (2), 75-87.

Yahp, B. (1992) The crocodile fury. (1992). Pymble, NSW (Australia): Angus & Robertson.

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Published

2018-09-04

How to Cite

Daly, S. (2018). Gothic Spaces and the Tropical City: reading The Crocodile Fury, Haunting the Tiger, Life’s Mysteries. ETropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics, 17(2). https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.17.2.2018.3653

Issue

Vol. 17 No. 2 (2018): Special Issue: Tropical Imaginaries & Living Cities

Section

Articles

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