Reconstruction Vol. 13, No. 1
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Writing Skin as Limit—How I Wrote The Monsoon Bride [1] / Michelle Aung Thin
Keywords: Literature; Postcolonialism; Psychoanalysis
<1> I wrote my novel The Monsoon Bride (Text, 2011) as part of a Creative Writing Ph.D. at the University of Adelaide. Set in 1930, the narrative examines the experience of living in Burma during colonial rule. British colonialism is a frequently explored historical moment in the English-language literary tradition. While many postcolonial novels are set in India, few are located in Burma even though it was annexed by the British and ultimately governed as an Indian province. Of these texts, fewer still have at their centre a mixed-race consciousness, in particular Anglo-Burmese or Anglo-Indian [2]. Instead, the vast majority of novels that represent colonialism do so either from the point of view of the European coloniser or the oppressed colonised subject. This binary is pervasive in contemporary literature as well as postcolonial scholarship. Colonialism may seem well explored within literary and academic writing, but this exploration rarely takes place from a mixed-race consciousness—a view that connects both the colonised and the coloniser.
<2> Although my novel follows characters who are English and Burmese, it is this in-between view that most closely informs my writing. My focus is Anglo-Burmese [3] subjects, people who were (for want of a better term) of “mixed-race” and consequently culturally in-between the colony of Burma, the land of their birth and their geopolitical reality, and the imagined homeland, England.
<3> Such material would seem to suit the confines of a practice-led research degree, the aim of which is always knowledge generation. Yet at times the academic environment can seem inimical to creative work. In his speech “The Ethics of Invention,” academic and place-maker Paul Carter notes that creative research is set apart form other strands due to its unique capacity to “put back together what [academic critics] have shattered” (3). This “putting back together” leads to suspicions that creative work is perhaps lacking in rigor—or perhaps hasn't comprehensively shattered its subject. Publishers also criticize writing produced within the academy, deeming it self-consciously wooden and too reliant on theory. Yet as the filmmaker and critic Trinh T Minh-ha argues in her essay “The Other Censorship,” to “deny one‘s critical responsibility” is to allow others (critics, perhaps gatekeepers too) to dictate “what shall be valued as ’art,‘ for whom this art will be produced, and how it will be administered” (227). Given my initial observations regarding the paucity of work in the area of in-between subjectivity, it is clearly an ethical obligation for me to at least attempt to explain my writing critically.
<4> In this essay I will address the ways that my critical research helped to shape my creative material. I will “narrativize” not only the creative process but also the thinking that helped me to situate my creative work within its literary context as well as argue my critical point of view and theorise my writing.
<5> As I mentioned earlier, I write about a group and place rarely represented in English-language literature and when I began the novel, I felt this absence as a political pressure. I wondered if my writing, although wholly imagined, ought also to be representative rather than only a representation. I was conscious that, like it or not, my work might be read as a kind of social documentation. Was I not therefore also obliged to make my novel utterly authentic—in the sense of truthful; quantifiable; recognisable—with the same rigor an anthropologist might apply to a piece of field research? Given the political inequity experienced by the Anglo-Burmese on one hand and the charges of complicity with the colonial oppressors often laid against this group on the other, I felt I had to at least consider showing the cultural, socio-demographic and political circumstances of my characters to rehabilitate the community‘s reputation.
<6> Anglo-Burmese is an ethnic identity tied to Burma‘s colonial past. This too presented a dilemma. Burma, renamed Myanmar in 1989, is a Southeast Asian country with a recent history of political oppression; it has been ruled by a Junta since 1962 and while recent political reforms are promising, the commitment by the Burmese military to a full and truly democratic is as yet untested (I began the novel in 2007 and completed it in May, 2010. During this time, political change in Burma was unthinkable.) Much of the contemporary literature set in Burma addresses the iniquity of military rule as well as the ethical dilemma for tourists who wish to visit the country [4]. Perhaps these were more suitable topics for a novel set in Burma? After all, of what importance is the past when the present is so grim and, in choosing to write about it, would I be replicating the Anglo-Burmese obsession with whiteness and Europeanness? Such writing might be considered politically inauthentic or naïve.
<7> I faced a further quandary. Although I was born in Burma, have Asian features and a Burmese surname, I was raised in the west, speak English as my first language (as did my parents) and have only a few words of Burmese. I am of “mixed-race”, but my cultural perspectives are western. My experience of Burma would inevitably be second-hand, imagined and researched from a safe distance. Yet, because of how I look and how my name reads (although anglicized), readers might assume otherwise. Did this also mean that my perspective on Burma was inherently illegitimate; that I was somehow taking a position to which I had no right? Was I trading unfairly on one part of my identity—mythologising it?
<8> All of these questions related not only to my choice of material but my entitlement as a writer. I feared that dealing with these ethical dilemmas would constrain my writing, forcing me to compromise the aesthetic and intellectual goals I‘d set for the novel. I firmly believe that a writer is entitled to write about whatever subject they choose, but I still found myself unable to proceed. However, when I considered these ethical difficulties from another angle, I saw instead that they were the material of the novel itself. Authenticity (and therefore inauthenticity) was my subject.
<9> I arrived at this realisation as a result of my critical research. One of my original impulses in writing the novel had been to explain or reconstruct the Anglo-Burmese experience. It was an identity that I‘d always thought of as slippery, compromised and culturally ambiguous. In his article, “Historicising Hybridity and the Politics of Location: Three Early Colonial Indian Narratives”, the historian Adrian Carton describes how mixed-race voices (such as Anglo-Burmese) are “deemed too inauthentic to represent the voice of alterity” and so, “lost to the whitewash” (144). Without a voice (either of alterity of normativity) perhaps it was no wonder the mixed-race Anglo-Burmese were under-represented in literature.
<10> But what had initially seemed like a critical insight was soon mitigated by the creative process. As I continued to draft the novel I found further complications of the ideal of the “authentic”; I discovered that no one within my representation of colonial Burma felt themselves to be “authentic”, not the Burmese national, not the English doctor come to do good and shoulder his "moral burden". If any one of the characters felt “authentic” in this context, it was Desmond, the ambitious Anglo-Burman prepared to pay for a chance at prestige with a form of political quietism. This critical/creative conversation continued to shape my work.
<11> One aspect of this process of defining and refining my creative subject, was working out where my writing belonged (or didn‘t belong) in the English-language literary tradition. I observed the ways “difference” is represented in literary texts and in consequence, argued that certain forms of difference are considered “authentic” while others are not. An early result of this fruitful process was that I began to theorise my writing, connecting the creative process to “skin” the ultimate human and individual limit, and naming my task “writing the limit” where skin was the specific limit or border that I addressed.
<12> There was an element of provocation in this focus because skin is often essentialised as a signifier of ethnicity. But in what ways would my writing provoke? And to whom was this provocation addressed? Readers? Postcolonial scholarship? Myself? It was easy to think of this theory of writing as an ethical stance or a means to ensure that my writing did not reinforce the binaries of colonialism. Yet, when I reflect again on this phrase and its provocation, I realise that it was as a statement of aesthetic possibility.
<13> Trinh Minh-ha writes: “Critical work requires a difficult mode of attention: one sees and listens to it happening; one plays (with) it as one experiences it in/as an activity of production” (234 Moon). For her, critical work is a means to find the “quality and beauty of the material” (234) and this rang true to me. It struck me that there was a beauty in the idea of writing skin as a limit. Not only in its possibilities as an “activity of production” but also, in the way that it might function like a musical phrase, inviting riffs and promising unanticipated directions. I‘ve discovered that “writing skin as limit” is a provocation to myself, a challenge to find not just the truth, but the beauty in my material. The limit is complex, as is the skin. Unexpected things happen when people touch. What I expected to be true and what I found to be true in the writing itself were very different indeed.
<14> The psychologist Didier Anzieu compares the skin‘s function as the body‘s physical limit to a psychic one as well in his theory of the “skin ego,” which explains ego formation. In his thinking, skin plays a crucial part in the development of the individual because it is the means of receiving the world (via the senses) as well as retaining an essential separateness or “selfhood.” Skin becomes a kind of metaphor for the individual, but Anzieu also valorises the idea of the skin as an absolute limit of the single psyche, contained within a single body.
<15> Yet the process of developing a “skin ego” relies on a “mother‘s skin” which first contains the new ego and then becomes the measure of its separateness—the thing to separate from. Imogen Tyler examines this anomaly in her essay, “Skin Tight Celebrity, pregnancy and subjectivity”, arguing that cultural taboos associated with the public exposure of a heavily-pregnant woman, whose skin is obviously stretched, are reflected in the significance Anzieu attributes to the skin‘s role as limit. The “skin” enables not only individuality, but also the capacity to have an ego or functioning psyche to be discrete and distinct. A skin, therefore, may contain only a single individual. Yet, every pregnant woman‘s skin stretches to accommodate two (or more). This had implications for my own reading of “mixed-race” skin “containing” plural identities. (Tyler‘s argument has implications for the novel too, a form distinguished by its capacity to represent consciousness, but I will not attempt to discuss them here).
<16> For my purposes, I defined skin as the sensing organ and literal covering of the body, its physical limit as well as a surface onto which cultural, socioeconomic, political and other values may be projected or inscribed. A substance that separated and connected; excluded and contained.
<17> But there are further ways of thinking of skin as a limit. In her essay “The Skin of the Community: Affect and Boundary Formation” the academic Sarah Ahmed argues that the outer limit of a community can also be described as a “skin,” one that derives its meaning metonymically, in other words, along a chain of association (104-106). This “skin” is only evident in the event of a strong, affective reaction to something or someone “other” and therefore, outside of the “skin.”
<18> Ahmed‘s conception of skin parallels Anzieu‘s in terms of a defining limit, but what particularly interested me was how meaning and skin were related, and how this meaning was created through a chain of association. As part of the process, each new association can obscure the previous value(s). In my own reading of novels representing mixed-race, Anglo-Burmese women, I was often struck by the way skin inevitably implied a chain of associated values. Authenticity is one that I‘ve already mentioned. Intimacy is another that began to fascinate me. The artist Svetlana Boym in her essay “On Diasporic Intimacy: Illya Kabokov‘s Installations and Immigrant Homes,” from the anthology, Intimacy, draws parallels between authenticity and intimacy in the context of cultural belonging—a kind of “limit” between the two states of being. This was a further, welcome clarification of what writing skin as a limit might mean—separation through connection.
<19> Thus far in this paper, I have narrativized the critical process that helped me to refine my subject. I will now reflect on the creative process beginning with a synopsis of the novel: The Monsoon Bride opens on the night train to Rangoon where Winsome Goode, a young woman half-Burmese and half-European, looks forward to her new life with the man she has just married but barely knows, the ambitious, controlling Desmond (of Anglo-Indian origin). Winsome is convent raised and educated—it was the practice of missions schools to take the children of European fathers from their Burmese mothers and educate them in a Western mould—and this is her first experience of life outside of school. In Rangoon, Desmond works for Jonathan Grace, a doctor recently arrived from England to test his theories on tropical fever. Winsome and Jonathan begin an affair. The backdrop to this love triangle is nascent nationalism in Burma (which paralleled Ghandi‘s programme of civil disobedience) led by students as well as lawyers and other professionals. The novel‘s climax takes place on the eve of the Saya San rebellion—a regional guerilla uprising. These events are seen from the perspective of Daw Sein, a wealthy Burmese businesswoman, educated in the west.
<20> My method throughout writing the novel was to write a few (creative) chapters, read archival material (sometimes in response to a practical question my drafting had raised) and then, to address the critical enquiry. I spent a few months in each area, although the largest portion of my time was spent in writing the novel itself, a far more demanding undertaking than the critical analysis. As a result, my creative writing was produced “in dialogue” with my scholarly research. This was a deeply satisfying conversation that not only gave me the confidence to face my material without a sense of constraint, but also fed my imagination.
<21> Early on, I drafted an outline of the story events and, as further chapters were completed, revised it. While this document evolved over the years, there was one thing I typed over and over at the top of each fresh version—a direct quotation from Leslie Hill‘s monograph Apocalyptic Desires, his critical reading of Marguerite Duras. When I read it, I thought specifically of the body‘s covering, its outer limit, the skin:
The body is not a mode of self-identity but a metaphor for whatever is excluded from identity: the body is a figure of madness, not self-possession. It is not an essence or nature, but the reverse of an essence or nature; it is a name for that which provokes crisis in the realm of representation by producing irreducible difference. And what it denotes most of all, in Duras as in Barthes, is desire. The reference to the body, then, is a reference to all that is transgressive in human behaviour. (Hill 30)I liked this quotation mainly because I could not entirely get at its meaning. I loved the idea of producing a “crisis in the realms of representation”—what writer would not respond to that? I liked the fact that what was in excess of identity was acted upon by the body. However I wondered why Hill linked irreducible difference with desire, as if difference itself was desire. This was important because in the novel, the main character‘s transgressions are familiar, sexual ones, enabling central questions such as: does the “political” shape sexual desire? What drives an erotic, skin-to-skin encounter? What happens to difference when skins touch? Thus, the metaphoric possibilities of “skin” arose early on in the drafting process—what it is, what it can stand in for, what meanings are attached to it.
<22> While the abstract possibilities of “skin” appealed to me, I also represent skin prosaically in my writing. I describe Rangoon through the senses, evoking smells, tastes, temperature and humidity, as well as sights and sounds. My intention was to engulf the reader (as I do the characters) in the place and time of the novel. Initially, this was a technical decision; the most effective way to enlist the reader‘s imagination is by appealing to their senses. However, as the novel developed, I realised this sensuality also served as a reminder to the reader that they too were in a skin; that their own skin may be overlaid with my words; that skin could be artificially evoked; that they might change “skins” and experience the different limits that dictated how a character inhabited a particular space.
<23> As part of my drafting process I kept a series of handwritten notebooks in which I wrote character dialogue, notes for scenes, images as well as musings as to how I might approach my material. In an excerpt from my notebook dated May 6th 2008, (early in the drafting process) I respond to Steven Connor‘s introduction to The Book of Skin as well as Claudia Benthien‘s monograph, Skin. On the Cultural Border between Self and the World (in particular, her analysis of Michael Ondaatje‘s novel, The English Patient), and considered how to approach writing about “skin”:
…the potential problem is making skin too much an object, less active—Ondaatje‘s skin is skin of interaction, that is exploration. Mine is skin that engulfs + overwhelms + consumes. Envelops. Mixed-race skin envelops in ways that other skins don‘t—maybe. (Notebook, May-August 2008)
It became my aesthetic aim to enfold my characters within Rangoon, or, to represent Rangoon as a kind of skin that encloses and limits. To this end, I divided the book into four sections, one for each tropical season (“heat,” “before the rain,” “rain,” “dry”). This enabled me to further embed the characters in Rangoon and to use the geographic rhythms of the city as a dramatic structure for events.
<24> In his seminal book, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, Robert Young traces the origins of hybrid stereotypes, drawing on early theories of miscegenation and transplantation including narratives of the degeneration of “exotics” in alien climates (6-20). While Winsome and Desmond arrive in Rangoon from the temperate hills and Daw Sein experiences the European climate as part of her education, comparing the west with the east, the most dramatic experience of transplantation is Jonathan‘s. My reading in the field of hybridity informed my representation of Jonathan. Here is his reaction to the monsoon:
With the rain came fever. Fever with its ripe sticky sweetness that was also the scent of desire. (Why had he not noticed this before?) That morning, all he could smell was longing. (The Monsoon Bride 146)
Monsoonal rain is often associated with sexual desire in colonial narratives. In the film Indochine, there is a famous sequence showing the consummation of sexual attraction between a French colonial planter and a soldier in the back of a chauffeur-driven car. Meanwhile, the Indian driver waits outside in the torrent, sheltered by an umbrella. Jonathan uses the intensity of his experience of the monsoon rains as an excuse to indulge his sexual desires, starting an affair with Winsome. During this time, he ignores his ostensible reason for coming to Rangoon, which is his medical research.
<25> However, when the season turns and the weather becomes more temperate, Jonathan regains his former sense of self:
…he forgot about the previous months of damp heat, the endless drumming rain; what was in front of him was all there was and compromise was not even though of. (The Monsoon Bride 165)
In the dry conditions, with a “cooler” head, Jonathan decides to end his affair with Winsome. The climate, once again, serves as an excuse for his behaviour; he dismisses his actions as a bodily response to the extremes of the monsoon. In his (colonial) imagination, he associates sexual excess with the mixed-race Winsome.
<26> My portrayal of Jonathan is a synthesis of creative, archival and critical research. I echo and satirise the theory that claims transplanted exotics degenerate morally as well as physically. In his actions, Jonathan conflates the weather (climate) with the social and cultural environment. Thus, “climate” takes on a double meaning in my writing.
<27> As an ongoing source of tension within the narrative, I wanted each of my characters to be in continual negotiation as to who and what they were. I wanted Rangoon to be an environment in which this constant and painful self-reflection was forced upon them. My archival reading showed me that Rangoon‘s social climate was indeed complex and idiosyncratic. Ethnic and racial divisions were, for the most part, rigidly enforced, yet there were anomalies and exceptions that undermined the logic of the colonial project.
<28> Maurice Collis was a magistrate in Rangoon during the late 20s and 30s, with a reputation for being a liberal thinker. His role exposed him to a wide range of social and ethnic strata within Rangoon. In his memoir, Trials in Burma, he describes a well-known couple, influential in both elite society and government, whose home he is visiting on some official business:
He was a Mohammedan and his wife was English. Rangoon was full of paradoxes like that. (44)
Collis‘s discomfort is palpable in his description of the couple‘s different ethnicities and in his use of the word “paradox.” While it was common for British and European men to take Burmese mistresses, marriage between a white woman and a black man was worthy of comment. Perhaps this is because it reverses the dominant ideologies and myths of sexual attraction that underpinned colonial society—a point I have explored in my earlier chapter discussing intimacy. As Collis observes, such marriages are relatively common in Rangoon; they only ought to be paradoxical.
<29> This anxiety seemed to me as much about the possibility of touch as anything else. To be confronted by race (as well as class and gender) is in itself a form of touching. From Collis‘s mention of this encounter, I imagined his extreme sensitivity to the presence of the couple as a hyper-awareness that bordered on arousal. He is in their home and despite the formality of the situation, must be aware of their domestic intimacies (sexual, physical, social and cultural). Of most interest to me was how Collis attributes his unease to Rangoon itself, as if it is the city that is made up of “paradoxes” and as such, a difficult space to navigate socially.
<30> Touch is a reflexive sense: one not only feels what one touches, but may also watch oneself in the act of touching. Touching often recruits the other senses: a scent may arise as the result of touch, in the crushing of a leaf, or the examination of a wound; one might hear the sound of the skin brushing against a rough surface. Early in the process I read Michel Serres‘s argument that the mingling or mutuality of the five senses gives rise to something greater, a kind of combined or “common” sense that enables an imaginative projection of the body beyond its limit of the skin (Five Senses). This idea of limits exceeded and projected into space—of abstract limits defining space—was of similar importance in my imagining of Rangoon. For me, the setting (time and place) of a story should also drive the narrative. This is most clearly expressed in the opening chapter, set in the European Refreshment Rooms, when Winsome and Desmond are intimidated into relinquishing their table to an English grande dame. Later in the novel, at a point of crisis, Winsome sees that Rangoon moulds the characters‘ actions:
Eating the air…they remade Rangoon in their own image—a floating city, adrift. That had felt honest to her, as if how you lived was simply a matter of will. Now she saw it was Rangoon that shaped them. Rangoon, corrupted and corrupting…the city dreamed them all. (The Monsoon Bride 178)
Both Winsome and Desmond are Anglo-Burmans/Indians who are “native” to Burma and products of colonialism. Within the colonial order, their position is always contingent. Thus, they are most likely to be affected by the abstract, arbitrary limits that define and redefine difference from white colonial as well as Burmese points of view. Given Collis‘s uncomfortable observation that the social paradox was also the norm, it occurred to me that both Burmans and English colonials must have experienced similar feelings of non-belonging, or contingency, from time to time. Thus, Rangoon became a space of continually shifting limits.
<31> As I stated at the start of this paper, I am Anglo-Burmese. My initial motivation for writing The Monsoon Bride was to explore the in-between perspective of the Anglo-Burmese in colonial Burma. This aim evolved into an examination of cultural belonging as a form of authenticity or intimacy. The process of in-depth, critical research, using the methods of literary criticism, offered the means to gain an invaluable perspective over material I often found intellectually intricate and emotionally confronting.
<32> I also found that the more rigorous my critical thinking, the less control I needed to exert over drafting the novel and the more “organic” a process it became. By organic, I mean that the material took on its own cohesion and that I made unexpected discoveries through writing. One such discovery was that when an outsider achieves cultural intimacy, they simultaneously experience a sense of loss. This observation framed my characterisation of both Desmond and Daw Sein, the two most intense characters in the novel. Daw Sein, in particular, feels this loss as a cultural emptiness:
Years after the Great War had ended, when she was a student travelling through Europe—her grand tour—it was not awe that she had felt among those much lauded icons of their civilisations, not jealousy either, but something worse; it was as if she had lived through a famine and could never again have enough to eat. (The Monsoon Bride 161)
Daw Sein feels her intimate understanding of European culture as an erasure or lack of Burmeseness. Her response is to replace this lack with a fomented nationalism.
<33> Although my writing is set in the colonial past, it is still seen through the prism of contemporary Burmese politics. Recent political change in Burma has resulted in increased interest in the novel due to its subject, and some of the concerns regarding the reading of my identity have been well founded. The process of research, especially critical research, has prepared me for the post publication experience of live interviews and public appearances—that is, for the role of the writer—and for this, I am grateful. The depth of my thinking about the nature of my novel, its subject-matter, where it belongs within the literary tradition and where I write from as a westernised Anglo-Burman, has proved invaluable in ensuring that I do not (accidentally) misrepresent myself—an ethical concern I discussed earlier.
<34> In summary, “skin” and “limit” as concepts intricately influenced the writing of The Monsoon Bride technically and aesthetically. Thinking about skin and limit enabled me to devise internal, interpersonal and external layers of narrative tension. The conception of Rangoon as an enfolding skin contributed to the establishment of setting and the slightly claustrophobic atmosphere of the novel as well as an aesthetic for the writing itself. My critical research was in continual conversation with the archival reading and creative drafting. This dialogue enriched the novel, informing my understanding of the space and characters I was representing. Publishers often praise narratives for a sense of organic wholeness, by which they mean a text has an internal fluency and cohesion. The rigorous critical approach I took to my material enabled me to write “organically” and framed the overall coherence of the novel. The discoveries made during the process of writing The Monsoon Bride have generated new questions which I have begun to consider in my new novel. “Writing skin as limit” remains with me as a provocation.
<35> Writing the novel was also a test of my own sense of cultural belonging and the ethics of writing about your “otherly” self. To write about Asia in Australia (or indeed in Canada, where I grew up, or the United States, or Europe) is to display one‘s own intimacy with the surrounding culture (for Svetlana Boym, cultural intimacy is the ultimate form of belonging). As a writer representing Asia to what will most likely be a largely white and middle-class readership and inured to reading from a normative position as I am, I act as a kind of translator of the authentic. This works in both directions; writing in English, I also display my western cultural authenticity to the Asian community. And it depends who is looking. Either way, I claim “authenticity” in two forms for myself, just as an Asian-Australian writer, the child of migrants (or a migrant themselves) seems authentically Asian to Australian readers and authentically Australian to their own parents and wider ethnic community. This is not necessarily related to the problem of writing that is read as representative rather than as representation, but rather, to the position of the writer who makes the limit between cultures their subject.
Notes
[1] This paper is based upon my Ph.D. thesis, “The Skin of a Writer” in particular, the introduction to my exegesis, “Volume Two: Representing Anglo-Burmese Subjectivity” and chapter 2.5, “‘Skin,‘ ’Limit,‘ and Writing ’Winsome of Rangoon.‘” I submitted my thesis for examination in December 2012.
[2] When Burma was annexed by Britain between 1885 and 1886, it was declared a province of India. Post annexation, Anglo-Indians, in the sense of those of mixed Indian and European parentage, emigrated to Burma and merging with the Anglo-Burmese population. Consequently, I refer to both Anglo-Burmese and Anglo-Indian in this paper.
[3] I use the terms “Anglo-Burmese” and “Anglo-Burman in this paper. Both terms have the same meaning, but “Anglo-Burman” is a slightly older form. I use the terms Burmese and Burman similarly.
[4] I am thinking specifically of Wendy Law-Yone‘s novel, Irrawaddy Tango.
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