VI - The Crocodile Fury (1992)

Summary

The Crocodile Fury (1992) by Beth Yahp has Australian readers as the target group for it was written and published in Australia. The writer, according to her acknowledgments, draws her information from books such as The Bomoh and the Hantu, Malay Superstitions and Beliefs, Traditions and Taboos, Hantu Hantu, and Ghost Stories of Old China. However, there are only two Malay words in the narrative. The Malay term Mat Salleh (p. 7), a nickname for white man, echoes throughout the narrative, for it is the name of the hill on which the ghost house stands. While the Malay word pontianak (p. 123), used only once, evokes the supernatural beliefs of the Malay community, the term Mat Salleh has a synecdochic function of representing the presence of the British colonials. These words also imply that the story is taking place in a Malay environment where physical abuse and oppression take place.

Yahp tells the story using the narrative genre of the fantastic where the narrator becomes the focus of the conflict of two belief systems, orchestrated in the narrative with the theme of physical abuse and oppression. The fantastic as a genre “supports two alternative readings: a supernatural one and a naturalistic one” (Carroll 1990, p. 145). The narration keeps these two interpretations in balance by making the first person narrator gather the story from her grandmother and her mother, thus repeating the events from two different perspectives. The “astute reader realises that neither of these interpretations is conclusive, and therefore, vacillates or hesitates between them” (Carroll 1990, p. 145). By using this narrative mode, Yahp manages to keep the story ambiguous, allowing the reader to suspend judgment between the naturalistic and supernatural explanation.

Since Yahp is using the narrative mode of the fantastic genre, the vagueness of language and language use play a crucial part in creating a blurring of reality. The vagueness of certain details is also strategically ambiguous. For instance, the convent has no name. It is just “The convent on the hill” (p. 4) or “The hill with the convent” (p. 7). Only readers who are familiar with Kuala Lumpur will recognize it as the Bukit Nanas Convent situated on a hill. The city also remains without a name. By stripping the narrative of any geographical details, Yahp manages to blur the boundaries between the natural world and the supernatural.