Abstract
This chapter explores the interwoven themes of motherhood and diasporic memories in Rani Manicka’s novel The Rice Mother (Manicka, The Rice Mother, Penguin Books, 2002). It studies the work as a family saga—a genre that links the familial or domestic histories with that of the community and the nation. Manicka’s family saga shifts the focus from the father and son dyad that underwrites the story of continuity and inheritance in patriarchy, and turns to the intergenerational continuities between the women in a family, that is, the mothers and daughters. At the same time, Manicka’s mother-daughter plot provides an account of a Ceylonese family in Malaysia, tracing the history of migration and the experiences of the diasporic communities as they root themselves in the new homeland. The novel traces the memories and traumas that constitute the diasporic heritage and their transmission over the generations as the community becomes a part of the nation. By placing the memories of mothers at the center, the novel intertwines the matrilineal legacy with a peripheral history—that of the diaspora—to trace its co-existence with the official history of the nation.
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Notes
- 1.
It is important to note the author’s complicated diasporic status. Manicka belongs to a Ceylonese family that migrated to Malaya at the turn of the nineteenth century. So in that sense, the novel is inspired by the experiences and stories that shaped her family, as Manicka points out in her 2004 interview. However, after spending her childhood in Malaysia, Manicka now lives in England. This brings in the charge laid against several postcolonial diasporic writers: of catering to the Anglo-american reading public by generalizing and reaffiriming oriental stereotypes like that of female servitude which is taken to be a common feature in the writings of the South-Asian diasporic women writers (Lau 2009, p. 584). While the inclusion of Manicka in the list of South-Asian diasporic writers is, in itself, problematic, the very first reading of The Rice Mother reveals the charge to be a generalization itself. Manicka’s novel, in its theme and content, is quintessentially, a Malaysian novel—an account of transgression and re-orientation of social boundaries of the Ceylonese diasporic community in Malaysia.
- 2.
The fate of Mui Tsai, Lakshmi’s only friend in the neigherbourhood is a tragic foil to Lakshmi’s coming-of-age narrative. Bought as a servant from China, Mui Tsai suffers unwanted sexual advances from her married but childless employer. When she gets pregnant and bears children, the children are taken away by the employer. This, followed by repeated sexual violence at the hands of the Japanese soldiers, unhinges Mui Tsai who goes mad and disappears. According to Singh (2015), Mui Tsai’s insanity is a “form of resistance to the erasure of her female self, body and sexuality” (p. 153).
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Saxena, V. (2021). Matrilineal Legacies: Family, Diaspora, and Memories in Rani Manicka’s The Rice Mother. In: Quayum, M.A. (eds) Reading Malaysian Literature in English. Asia in Transition, vol 16. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5021-5_12
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