Nuraliah Norasid

Nuraliah Norasid.png

CRITICAL INTRODUCTION

Written by Andy Winter
Dated 23 February 2022

While Nuraliah Norasid is best known for her debut novel The Gatekeeper (2016), she has also published short stories and essay in Quarterly Literature Review Singapore (QLRS), Perempuan: Muslim Women Speak Out, Best New Singaporean Short Stories, Volume 3, among others. Her works engage with socio-political issues in Singapore, often portraying the lived realities and struggles of racial minorities and the working class. As an avid gamer and huge fan of Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls series, Nuraliah is also intrigued by the potential of video game worlds to provide an intertextual and discursive space for real world social and political realities. The virtuality of such spaces allows for the depiction of minoritarian cultures and experiences that would otherwise go unrepresented or underrepresented; they are realms of possibilities to enact what seems impossible.

Published in QLRS in 2016, “Madam Jamilah’s Family Portrait” captures the struggles of a Malay mother raising six children on her own. The short story is framed as an interview with The Straits Times—Singapore’s national English newspaper—taking place in Madam Jamilah’s three-room Yishun flat and is divided into three sections. Aptly titled “The Glance”, the first section paints the family in broad strokes. Having gone to jail for “domestic and substance abuse”, the children’s father is not part of this family portrait. Not much is spoken or mentioned about him and when Madam Jamilah does, it is on the topic of divorce. Instead of enrolling into a prestigious school with his PSLE score of 253, fifteen-year-old Azman–the oldest–chooses a neighbourhood school closer to home to reduce traveling expenses. Together with his fourteen-year-old sister Asyirah, the two of them take on responsibilities at home. They tutor their youngest sister Nabilah who is unable to attend kindergarten or nursery, while also making sure that the rest of their siblings get ready on time for school. In fact, all six children help with household chores and duties.

Nuraliah’s first “glance” at this family hence presents the complex realities and households of low-income single parents, further compounded by the fact that Madam Jamilah is a single mother who is not English educated. In such families and households, children are no strangers to sacrifice and hardship, alleviating parental burdens in whatever capacity they can. It is not simply a matter of filial piety, but of necessity and survival. This is reinforced in their mother’s emphasis on a good education so that her children would grow up to become successful, or, as Madam Jamilah poignantly puts: “Not someone like me.” Education, in the eyes of the working class and the marginalised, confers a hope that they can break free from the chains of poverty and suffering, that they (and the generations after them) can experience a better way of life—one in which children do not need to take on the additional role of the caregiver. 

The title of the second section is particularly suggestive of Nuraliah’s concerns in this short story. “Positioning” refers not just to the photographer’s adjusting of the camera for the photoshoot at the end of the section, but also to the concept of positionality—that is to say, where one is situated in relation to others along the lines of class, gender, ethnicity and culture. As a sociological concept, positionality elucidates how individual identities are malleable and socially constructed as well as how such identities shape and frame our perspectives of our environment(s) and the world. [i] For the photographer, the act of photographing this “impossible family” is important to him as it triggers childhood memories of a similar background; like Azman and Asyirah, the photographer felt the same feelings of “self-consciousness” about his family situation, which he hid behind an artificial “carefree[ness]”. It is perhaps such striking feelings of familiarity and empathy that he regards this family through a lens of “impossib[ility]”, that he should encounter other people with similar experiences.

Although the photographer demonstrates thought and care when it comes to photographing the family, a stark contrast to the reporter who comes across as indifferent, the sensitivity which he shows the family is undercut by the exploitative gaze of journalism, which is reductive in its representation of issues pertaining to the marginalised within society. The interview by The Straits Times intends to present Madam Jamilah’s family portrait through the narrative angle of resilience and optimism, “how cheerful she is despite practically being a single mother with kids to feed in the face of the economic downturn.” This is reinforced by how Madam Jamilah does “[not seek] help from the government or from her relatives”, her character making it too easy for the media to co-opt her into this “snapshot” of a working-class single mother who is independent and persevering. Rather than interrogating the structural and systemic issues of marginalisation and poverty that have culminated in such living conditions of hardship and sacrifice, such media portrayals reduce her to an inspirational figure. Madam Jamilah becomes subjected to the machinations of poverty and inspiration porn that is designed to incite empathy and be attention-grabbing, all for the sake of profit and selling newspapers.

Madam Jamilah significantly does not speak fluent English and her interview answers are for the most part in Malay. This begets the question of how true and accurate the reporter’s translation of her words will be. What will become lost in translation? How will the interview be edited for publication and for an English-speaking audience? The superficiality and palatability of journalistic representation is once more underscored by the thoughts of Madam Jamilah as they are about to be photographed and immortalised in national newsprint: she worries about how her family and house would look, relieved that the living room had already been cleaned and that everyone was in their Sunday best. In spite of all the odds stacked against them, Madam Jamilah and her children have to look and play the part of a family that is happy, clean, functional, and put together. This veneer, the text suggests, is what will offer the family a means of securing social acceptance. Here, Nuraliah highlights the tension between the ostensible ‘visibility’ of the family’s situation and their continued marginalization.  

Just as Madam Jamilah “turns her eyes away” from the camera’s “flash”, Nuraliah’s short story turns away from the reductive representations of marginalised communities within mainstream media portrayals. As a portrait of low-income families, the story spotlights what it means to be a single working Malay mother. In illuminating Madam Jamilah and her family’s positionality, Nuraliah exposes the effects of socio-economic stratification that is very often glossed over within Singapore. Forcing us to confront the lived experiences and struggles of people living in the margins, the short story is a “flash” that we cannot avert our eyes from. National visibility and representation are not enough for the marginalised to have a voice if it is through institutions of the state. Only through art and storytelling that the marginalised be liberated from such exploitative frameworks and speak their truths.

Such explorations of marginalities are recurring themes throughout Nuraliah’s body of work. Where “Madam Jamilah’s Family Portrait” presents readers with a slice of reality, The Gatekeeper heightens the racial politics and dynamics of Singaporean society through fantasy and mythopoeic fiction. Written as part of Nuraliah’s doctoral dissertation at Nanyang Technological University, The Gatekeeper is a speculative fiction novel that takes inspiration from the Greek mythology of Medusa and Perseus in its mythopoesis. Winner of the 2016 Epigram Books Fiction Prize and the Best Fiction Title for the Singapore Book Awards in 2018, The Gatekeeper has been described by Dr. Jennifer Crawford in a blurb included in the novel as “a marvellous blend of home comforts and pains, and the strange treasures of other realms”. This description is appropriate given how Nuraliah draws our focus to the seemingly mundane and the quotidian through a fantastical and monstrous lens.

Set in a fantasy world inhabited by human and non-human beings, the novel, the first of an intended trilogy, follows the life of Ria, a young medusa. Living with her sister, Barani, the medusas are one day forced to flee their hometown in the outskirts of Manticura, after Ria turns the entire village into stone. They manage to find refuge in the underground Nelroote, a place filled with non-human beings just like them: Scereans, Tuyun, Feleenese, Cayanese. It is in Nelroote where Ria becomes the eponymous gatekeeper of the city, defending it from external threats with her gorgon gaze. 

Manticura is clearly an allegorical Singapore. The two fictional languages Ro’ ‘dal and Sce’ ‘dal undoubtedly represent English and Malay respectively. Meanwhile, Tuyunri, as an indigenous tongue, is reflective of Singapore’s spoken dialects that are fast dying out as a result of the government’s language policies in the late 20th century, which sought to replace dialects with four official languages in the name of unifying the diverse local community. Ro’ ‘dal is a “clipped” “controlled” and “colonial-born” language, the absolute antithesis of Sce’ ‘dal, a language of “br[oken] words, shorten[ened] sentences” (Nuraliah 3) with a total disregard for grammatical structure. The earliest lingua franca of the region, the language of the Scereans comprises of Malay-sounding words such as cikgu (“teacher”) and cerita (“story”). It is the language “spoken in most villages”; Sce’ ‘dal speakers are situated in the lower classes, based in the undercity Nelroote. On the other hand, Ro’ ‘dal is “the common tongue of the large human towns,” (50) its speakers belonging to upper and upper middle classes residing in Manticura. Nuraliah’s linguistic construction is very much analogous to the language politics of multi-cultural Singapore, where the “neutral” English language is employed as an official language in the name of racial equality and social cohesion. Like the notion of speaking ‘good English’ in Singapore, the fluency and command of Ro’ ‘dal in the novel signifies one’s class and educational background. This is evidenced in how characters such as Eedric and Adrianne who speak perfect/fluent Ro’ ‘dal hail from well-to-do and privileged backgrounds, navigating Manticurean society without being judged for how they talk. The preference of the English-sounding Ro’ ‘dal over the Malay-sounding Ro’ ‘dal as the official/main language thus underscores the demarcation of social classes through language.

The inherent inequality and fragmentation in the land is yet emphasized in the social hierarchy that privileges the human Manticureans above non-humans, who are represented as monsters and physically Othered through their appearance. For instance, the medusas have snakes for hair, the Scereans are covered in reptilian scales, the Tuyuns have bodies with the texture of rock and tree bark, the Feleenese and the Cayanese respectively have cat- and dog-like features. The degree of marginalisation varies between races, based on how visibly Other they are and how well their communities has socially and culturally assimilated into the mainstream human society. As if the discrimination and stratification was not sufficiently blatant, the non-human races literally live beneath their human counterparts in the darkness of Nelroote. A city far less modern than Manticura, Nelroote is known for being the hub of illegal activities such as smuggling and black-market businesses. While Manticureans enjoy life above ground, the denizens of Nelroote scrape by and try to make ends meet. Those that try to integrate into the society above are usually met with derision and scorn from both sides; they are seen as vermin by Manticura and as traitors by Nelroote.

These social, cultural, and linguistic tensions are compounded and heightened through the refiguring of the Medusa and Perseus myths through the characters of Ria and Eedric respectively. First appearing in Homer’s Iliad, Medusa is one of the three Gorgon sisters, monstrous winged women with venomous snakes for hair and a hatred for mortal men. The most familiar version of Medusa’s origin story begins with her as a beautiful maiden who is raped by Poseidon in the temple of Athena, the latter unfairly punishing her by transforming her into a hideous monster. As the Medusa figure, Ria is the gatekeeper of her people’s history and culture, safeguarding them from colonial erasure and oppression. Her powers of turning life into stone, of “immortalis[ing] what aged” (Nuraliah 44), is emblematic of her body as a site of inscription and persistence. At once the storyteller and the story itself, she is rendered an artefact of memory and history. This is elucidated in the novel’s introduction when the interrogator brings to light Ria’s penchant for storytelling: “Ria, you like to story, yah? Tell lah. Tell us.” (Nuraliah 3). Where the Medusa figure of Greek mythology is a creature of destruction, she holds the gift of creation in Nuraliah’s mythopoesis. For Ria, to create a body of stone is akin to creating a story. Her gaze is not just one that is deadly, but one of a historian. She is a rejection of the cultural homogenization that the project of colonialism undertakes, her murderous gaze protecting the minority groups from complete effacement. She gives the colonisers/humans a taste of their medicine, as the very act of turning flesh into stone is itself a form of literal homogenization. Her body thus becomes the site of the collective construction and preservation of stories. These stories belong to a tribal society, scattered across the landscape of indigenous history. Furthermore, her body becomes a medium for narratives and voices situated within the margins, those that have been underrepresented and unrepresented since time immemorial. Where the classics have frozen the Medusa figure as victim-turned-villain, Ria as a vehicle for revisionist mythopoeia is engaged in the process of de-petrification and resurrection of what has been historicized and pushed away into the margins. In gazing at and rewriting the historicized, Nuraliah’s novel expounds on how language and narrative are simply tools for the semiotic transmission and textual construction of history. Whether effaced or designed, language highlights the tensions and implications of colonialism, begetting the question of who gets to write, rewrite or erase history. Sce’ ‘dal becomes the designated linguistic medium for storytelling of minoritarian cultures, precisely due to the way Ro’ ‘dal is employed and established to homogenise narratives and uphold a dominant culture. That Nuraliah’s Medusa protagonist is a Sce’ ‘dal speaker emboldens this project of dislodging history and creating her-story.

Eedric, on the other hand, is a complete inversion of the legendary Greek hero, Perseus. Traditionally depicted as the demigod hero who slays the gorgon through decapitation with the aid of the gods, Nuraliah’s Perseus is instead made monstrous and becomes romantically intertwined with the Medusa figure of the novel. Part human and part monster (specifically Cayanese), Eedric is viewed by Manticurean society as a “minor Human” and by the rest of the non-humans as a “survivalist”, someone who could blend into Human society with their “Human-looking form” (7) masking a genetic makeup of monstrosity. His biracial identity becomes a main source of conflict as he tries to control his body, literally taming and suppressing the beast in him. Besides trying to deal with the erratic hybridity of his body, his relationships with his father and his girlfriend become increasingly strained. To his father, he is nothing but “tainted” (78). To his girlfriend Adrianne, he is perceived as becoming more alien and distant as time goes on, to the extent that she declares she “does not know [who he was] any more” (86). His experience magnifies what it means to be multiracial and the struggles of trying to ‘pass’ within a homogenous society. Eedric’s identity crisis juxtaposed against Ria’s narrative highlights the various forms of race-based trauma and violence that have been born out of colonialism and its enforcement of categorisation, of differences. It is intriguing to note how the novel begins with both Ria and Eedric incarcerated, already illustrating the state violence inflicted upon marginalised bodies. Although both narratives unfold in different time periods and locations, their lived realities intersect with one another, accentuating the fact that they are all victims of racism, be it casual, institutional, or systemic. Moreover, Ria and Eedric’s intersecting narratives reaffirm the need for solidarity among marginalised groups, and the need to celebrate differences and diversity.

Through revisionist mythopoesis and linguistic construction, Nuraliah’s The Gatekeeper imagines a speculative space that bears similarities to Singapore in its material, social, cultural, and political landscapes, all whilst interrogating the notions of history, indigeneity, and cultural identity. With expert world-building only possible with a hand of tenderness and an eye for intricacy, it is an ambitious project that accomplishes what it sets out to do. As the first book of a trilogy, The Gatekeeper sets a highly promising precedent for how the other two books would unfold. It is a novel that is not only breaking new ground in the speculative fiction scene, but in the broader context of Singapore Literature, expanding our understanding of what a ‘Sing Lit’ novel could look like. As a work inspired by a love for video games, Nuraliah’s debut novel as well as her short stories elucidate how virtuality (be it through game narratives or photography/visual art) can centre the realities and experiences of minorities. Although her writing is very much localised and directed to issues of systemic violence and hurt within Singapore, Nuraliah’s projects cannot and should not be confined to such geopolitically narrow readings. The narratives she constructs, the worlds her characters inhabit, are highly reflective and emblematic of the real world we live in, the world beyond Singapore and Singapore Literature.

Notes

[i] See B. Warf’s “Positionality”.

Works Cited

Nuraliah Norasid. “Madam Jamilah’s Family Portrait.” Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Vol. 15 No. 3 Jul 2016, http://www.qlrs.com/story.asp?id=1272. Accessed 1 December 2021.

Nuraliah Norasid. The Gatekeeper. Singapore: Epigram Books, 2017. Print.

Warf, B. “Positionality.” Encyclopedia of geography. Vol. 1 (2010): 2258-2258. https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412939591.n913. Accessed 25 May 2022.

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