V - The Shrimp People (1991)

Summary

Rex Shelley' The Shrimp People (1991), like the Rice Bowl, portrays the English of yet another community of people in Singapore, the Portuguese Eurasians. They came to Singapore in the early nineteenth century after Thomas Ferrao, who accompanied Stamford Raffles to Singapore in 1819, invited his relatives from Malacca and Penang to join him (Daus 1989, p. 65). Their “language” was called Cristão and the Malays called the Catholics Serani (Daus 1989, p. 11) or Nasareen, which “means a half-caste” (Clifford 1989, p. 138). However, “Cristão the Portuguese Eurasian language has not survived in Singapore” (Daus 1989, p. 75). The need to identify the characteristics of a Portuguese Eurasian dominates chapter fourteen of Shelley' novel, where the group of Portuguese Eurasians meet in Perth for dinner. Shelley' use of a mixture of narrators is a kind of illusion breaking device. The Perth scenes are narrated by a first person narrator, Robert, while the life of the family of Rodrigues is narrated by a third person narrator. Chapter fourteen, in fact, acts as a narrative self-commentary, where the characters discuss the books written about their community. However, after chapter eighteen, the Perth scenes disappear and the focus shifts to Bertha the protagonist in the story within the novel. The underlying theme of patriotism surfaces slowly as the story within the story unfolds while the novel portrays the linguistic hybrid that replaced Cristão.

This hybrid is made up of Standard British English with Malay words and phrases. Take for instance the utterance “Doan fergait der chinchalok” (p. 94). Here the Malay word chinchalok forms part of the utterance. According to Talib, what is evident in the phrase “Doan fergait” is the “attempt to imitate the pronunciation of certain vowels in Singapore English by changing the spelling of some words” (Singapore Literature in English, p. 280). This sort of hybridization, that is, the mixing within a single concrete utterance two or more different linguistic consciousnesses, is the natural development of Portuguese Eurasian English after the use of Cristão has stopped. When Joe Coombes, the talkative old man in Perth, uses words such as gerderbak-gederbook (p. 20), kichie-brat (p. 21), and hitammanis (p. 23), he is neither code-mixing nor borrowing, for he has grown up in Singapore using these phrases with his dialect of English.