XII - Shadow Theatre (2002)

Summary

Fiona Cheong' second novel Shadow Theatre (2002) was published in New York. Her first novel, The Scent of the Gods (1991), about a young girl growing up in Singapore, was likewise published in New York. The narrative structure of the novel Shadow Theatre grows out of its title, which is derived from the Malay words, wayang kulit. In the performance of this traditional theatre, wayang kulit, the shadows of the highly decorated leather puppets, mounted on strips of light wood, appear on a screen to play a part in a narrative and disappear into the darkness. This is made possible by the light behind the screen as the puppeteer manipulates the wooden strips while narrating the story in order to animate the figures. Fiona Cheong combines the modern convention of multiple narrators and the traditional pre-Islamic Malay way of dramatizing the story. Each narrator appears and disappears like shadows on a traditional screen to give their perspective of an incident that occurred sometime in the past. It has the characteristic fluidity of discourse found in oral cultures, in which an ever-changing narrative is continuously altered by successive contributors. The theme of child abuse is slowly unravelled as these narrators recount what they heard and saw. As there are eight narrators, the writer uses subtitles to show the connections and link between them and the main character Shakilah who is in the main victim of child abuse in the narrative.

In Cheong' narrative strategy, the emphasis in the narration is on the individual consciousness and sensibility of each narrator. In the representation of the dominant speaking voice of Helena Sim, one of the narrators whom the reader hears more than any other, Cheong uses stylization. The writer exploits Helena' Singapore-English, which grows out of her historical past, to highlight her personality. As a Peranakan, she is a Malay-speaking Chinese. Although she has an English secondary school education, unintentional code-mixing in her spoken language takes place. For instance, the Malay word bukan appears like a question tag consistently in her narration: “still fresh for me, bukan?” (p. 112), “the fellow just died, bukan?” (p. 113), “We grew up around here, bukan?” (p. 120), and “Don' tempt fate, bukan?” (p. 121). Malay phrases like, bodohbodoh (p. 98), betul-betul appear more than once in her narration. Although there are contextual explanations, the writer provides a glossary.