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| Lloyd Fernando |
Birthed in Kandy, Sri Lanka (1926) to Ceylon-Sinhalese parents, Lloyd Fernando followed his parents at the tender age of twelve to colonised Malaya or Tanah Melayu. They settled in Singapore in 1938 . This early age migration had a great and deep influence on Lloyd Fernando, both emotionally, psychologically, and mentally. He studied at St. Patrick's until the Japanese occupation in Singapore from 1943 to 1945. Not only was his formal education disrupted, his father as killed during a Japanese bombing raid. After the man of the house's untimely death, young Lloyd took on menial jobs to fend for his mother and younger siblings. Amongst the jobs that honed his skills, and help bring home the bacon were trishaw rider, construction labourer, and apprentice mechanic. He signed up in the Indian National Army, under the Ceylon branch.
Due to the war, he was made a late bloomer for he could only enter University at the age of 29, after passing the Cambridge School Certificate and serving as a schoolteacher for a good few years. Graduating with double honours in English and Philosophy earned him an assistant lecturer in Universiti Malaya.
After obtaining his PhD in Literature in English from Leeds University, he served as Head of the English Department at the University of Malaya from 1967 to 1978, where he was made a professor in 1967. He then took an early retirement at 52 to study Law in London. Fernando was admitted as Advocate and Solicitor of the High Court of Malaya in 1980, at the age of 54.
He suffered a stroke in 1997, paralysed, wheelchair-bound, and passed away on 28 February 2008. He was awarded the title of Professor Emeritus in 2005 for his contribution to Universiti Malaya. His legacy remains as one of the seven Anglophone writers in Malaya/Malaysia, a gateway to Commonwealth Literature, and championing Malaysian Literature in English.
Lloyd Fernando's Works
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| Green is the Colour (1993 |
Lloyd Fernando's Green is the Colour is a very interesting novel. The country is still scarred by violence, vigilante groups roam the countryside, religious extremists set up camp in the hinterland, there are still sporadic outbreaks of fighting in the city, and everyone, all the time, is conscious of being watched. It comes as some surprise to find that the story is actually a contemporary (and very clever) reworking of a an episode from the Misa Melayu, an 18th century classic written by Raja Chulan.
In this climate of unease, Fernando employs a multi-racial cast of characters. At the centre of the novel there's a core of four main characters, good (if idealistic) young people who cross the racial divide to become friends, and even fall in love.
There's Dahlan, a young lawyer and activist who invites trouble by making impassioned speech on the subject of religious intolerance on the steps of a Malacca church; his friend from university days, Yun Ming, a civil servant working for the Ministry of Unity who seeks justice by working from within the government.
The most fully realised character of the novel is Siti Sara, and much of the story is told from her viewpoint. A sociologist and academic, she's newly returned from studies in America where she found life much more straightforward, and trapped in a loveless marriage to Omar, a young man much influenced by the Iranian revolution who seeks purification by joining religious commune. The hungry passion between Yun Ming and Siti - almost bordering on violence at times and breaking both social and religious taboos - is very well depicted. (Dahlan falls in love with Gita, Sara's friend and colleague, and by the end of the novel has made an honest woman of her.)
Like the others, Sara is struggling to make sense of events :
Nobody could get may sixty-nine right, she thought. It was hopeless to pretend you could be objective about it. speaking even to someone close to you, you were careful for fear the person might unwittingly quote you to others. if a third person was present, it was worse, you spoke for the other person's benefit. If he was Malay you spoke one way, Chinese another, Indian another. even if he wasn't listening. in the end the spun tissue, like an unsightly scab, became your vision of what happened; the wound beneath continued to run pus.
Although the novel is narrated from a third person viewpoint, it is curious that just one chapter is narrated by Sara's father, one of the minor characters, an elderly village imam and a man of great compassion and insight. This shift in narration works so well that I'm surprised Fernando did not make wider use of it.
The novel has villain, of course, the unsavoury Pangalima, a senior officer in the Department of Unity and a man of uncertain racial lineage (he looks Malay, has adopted Malay culture, so of course, that's enough to make him kosher!). He has coveted Sara for years, and is determined to win her sexual favours at any cost.
The novel is not without significant weaknesses. It isn't exactly a rollicking read, and seems rather stilted - not least because there are just too many talking heads with much of the action taking place "offstage", including the rape at the end, which is really the climax of the whole novel.
Click on the following link to get a sample of the book: http://www.epigrambooks.sg/wp-content/uploads/CLASS-Green-Sample.pdf
After giving up on my pursuit of readily-made summaries of Scorpion Orchid by Lloyd Fernando, after a few days search; I have decided to do my own summary of bits and pieces of the story (that can be recalled).
Four male schoolmates of different yet distinguished races, Malay, Eurasian, Indian, and Chinese, live harmoniously. All four enter University of Singapore and thus the bildungsroman stage begins. Being in different life journeys has led them to be distant yet they share a common ground- love for the prostitute Sally @ Siti Saleha who loves freely without any discrimination. The boys are representative's of their race yet the sex worker is a symbolism for Singapore. Malay by immemorial but nicknamed Sally to give a Colonial feel. No matter how distasteful my interpretation of what has become of the once innocent yet kind and loving Saleha, the boys manage to stay united, in one way or another. The story is set in Singapore and probably made as a social guidance for the new Malaya by a Ceylon born writer.
Works on Llyod Fernando
http://asiatic.iium.edu.my/v2n2/article/Pauline.pdfhttp://www.nzasia.org.nz/downloads/NZJAS-Dec03/5.2_5.pdfhttp://eprints.oum.edu.my/458/
Works Cited;
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