Forests and ecocultural disequilibrium in two postcolonial novels from Cameroon and Singapore

Abstract

Forests have always had a very special resonance with humans, one which is evidenced in the ways they are depicted in literatures and art throughout human civilization. This study attempts to look at the ways in which two contemporary authors, one Cameroonian and the other Singaporean, depict the forest in their novels. In both Linus Asong’s Crown of Thorns and Meira Chand’s A Different Sky, the nature/culture binary is shown as primal. Both narratives underline the essential inhospitability of the forests for human habitation. However, Asong’s narrative insists on the importance of ritual in negotiating this uninhabitable terrain and how, were the conduct of this ceremonial ritual to fail, the nebulous harmony between humans and this terrain will be irrevocably broken. Chand’s text, set in Second World War Singapore, reveals how, when the cultural terrain is rendered inhospitable to man due to conquest and human brutality, the forest appears as a refuge. However, this is misleading, for the essential disequilibrium between nature and culture is too deep to be overridden or resolved.

In the middle of our walk of life, I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost. (Dante, 2006, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Canto 1.)

Henriette Roos argues that environmental literature should stress the link between nature and culture and relate them to more global perspectives (Roos, 2011: 55). Like Roos, Lawrence Buell, Ursula K. Heise, and Karen Thornber emphasize the close relations between ecology and the cultures surrounding it with the understanding that cultures generally grow out of ecological spaces (2011: 419). Therefore, our postcolonial—ecocritical enquiry begins by investigating how fictional narratives can express human interaction with the natural world within specific cultures and histories. Recent studies (Appadurai, 1996; Hornborg, 1996) recognize the relation of modernity to locality. In the field that is labelled as “new ecology” (Scoones, 1999), assumptions of equilibrium within eco-communities have come to be challenged. New ecology emphasizes dynamic, historical, and partly unknowable relations between society and the environment (Fiedler et al., 1997; McCabe, 2004; Pickett and Ostfeld, 1995). Consequently, one central focus becomes the problem of “disturbance” that can erupt in both natural and human communities. Using this as a starting point, we identified “ecological disequilibrium” as a central theme that emerges in literary works from postcolonies in Africa and Asia.

Our study initiates an ecocultural investigation of forests in literatures from the British postcolonies of Cameroon and Singapore, both situated in the equatorial belt, directly above the equator, and with a rich legacy of rainforests. The texts we focus on are Linus Asong’s The Crown of Thorns (1990) and Meira Chand’s A Different Sky (2010). The choice of both texts and nations is not arbitrary but directly relates to this observation by Deepak Kumar, Vinita Damodaran, and Rohan D’Souza:

The British Empire marked an exceptional global ecological moment in world history. Between 1600 and 1960, through economic expansion, political strategy, military conquest, and territorial control, it held and linked separate lands and varied peoples. (2011: 1)

It is pertinent to note that the two texts are aligned with different phases of British colonial history. Meira Chand’s narrative stretches from 1927 to the mid-1950s, prior to Malayan independence from Britain. Asong’s narrative is set in 1961 during the first decade of Cameroonian independent rule. Thus the texts usefully represent different phases of empire. The colonial powers operated under the impression that this vast expanse of diverse ecologies, varied topographies and culturally heterogeneous populations could be treated as a “meaningful whole in terms of collective history” (Grove et al., 1998: 1). This means that postcolonial examinations benefit from looking at these holistically. In other words, comparing these two obviously distinct cultures from Asia and Africa may prove fruitful in the light of the fact that they both share a colonial past. Also, comparing the responses of disparate cultures to the natural world should reignite cognition of the important fact that a common humanity operates beneath these differences and has done so for millennia. Furthermore, a great deal of postcolonial theorizing continues to favour national and regional literatures. Our objective, therefore, is to bring out the intercontinental experience of the British colonial legacy. The Crown of Thorns reflects the early days of independence when Southern Cameroons, which was administered by the British colonial administration, joined French Cameroon as a federal state in 1961. Chand’s historical novel is set in colonial Singapore during the Second World War. Hence, focusing on the works of Asong and Chand will explain how these countries’ convergences and departures, in terms of the experiences they have gone through as independent states, inform innovative trends in postcolonial studies, with specific reference to the relations between humans and forest ecology. The forests in particular and nature in general are presented as inhospitable and dangerous, thwarting human efforts to subdue them or survive in harmony with them. In both texts, forests are also important natural resources and humans rely on them for subsistence. Nevertheless, Asong and Chand acknowledge forests as precarious, even treacherous. Furthermore, both texts show the differences between indigenous or native approaches to the forests as distinct from colonial attitudes.

Other interesting points of cultural consonance and dissonance emerge on a closer reading of these texts. For instance, in both, women seem to be excluded from forested areas. Forests, as depicted in earlier colonial texts such as in Somerset Maugham and Joseph Conrad, continue to remain predominantly male domains in these societies, though the cultural significations for excluding women vary. Secondly, the reasons why the forests are demarcated from civic zones are also interestingly but differentially negotiated in these two texts. Thus, differences in how Asians and Africans relate to the forests physically and spiritually, as seen in Asong’s and Chand’s narratives, provide us with a brief glimpse into how the environment conditions life within different cultures.

Asong’s 1990 novel appears to favour the view that nature is perilous and human efforts to survive within it or relate to it can only be achieved through patterns of cultural practices that are generally ritualistic in nature. More explicitly, belief systems, shared knowledges, and sets of cultural principles are adopted by a people as an expression of, and a response to, the hazardous ecological or environmental realities surrounding them. Thus, Asong seems to echo Michael Cohen’s view that a culture responds to its environment according to its desires (Cohen, 2004: 9). Hence, Asong’s novel seems intent on indicting the insensitivities of the colonial powers. Published two decades later, Meira Chand’s historical novel also appears to iterate the agency and autonomy of nature but adopts a more impersonal tone. In A Different Sky, rainforests are presented as inhospitable terrain. This underscores the view that nature and culture rarely exist in harmony and can at best form an uneasy alliance. Furthermore, the natural land, when inhabited by man, seems to be imbued with the cultural (and gender) prejudices that permeate the cultural landscape.

As postcolonial ecocultural critics, therefore, our objective is to present the similitude in the writers’ depiction of the forests as being hostile, but differing in interesting ways in terms of the cultural relations to the environment in the two postcolonial cultures. The first narrative traces indigenous practices that are on the one hand necessary to successfully survive within the locus of the forest, highlighting the disruption of the connection between forest ecology and the culture of the people by the agents of colonialism. The second novel emphasizes how the colonial enterprise, involving the colonies in its wars, galvanized through its war efforts a growing disjunction between humans and the natural world. Therefore, both texts reveal a disequilibrium between “culture and nature” that has arisen due to distinct historical predicaments and cultural specificities. Also, both texts touch on the geographical and the symbolic aspects of forests but with a differing focus: the former intends to demonstrate the differences between the native and colonial approach to the space of the forests, while the latter text focuses on the historical role the forest played in Southeast Asia.

In several works of Cameroon literature, such as Asong’s The Crown of Thorns (1990/1995), Nol Alembong’s Forest Echoes (2012), Shadrach Ambanasom’s Son of the Native Soil (2009a), and Bole Butake’s Lake God (1999), forests are perceived as sacred and having symbolic spiritual and cultural values. The potency of art in its representation of forests, the healing properties and cultural symbols that are associated with forests, as well as the social organization and even the politics of forests’ indigenous peoples all contribute to these values. Human life, for the most part, is depicted as being dependent on the forest; the forest is inclusive of all kinds of life, including fauna and flora as well as other physical landscapes within it, such as lakes, rivers, ponds, and caves, which are imbued with mystical presences (Elgezeery, 2013: 34). Because of largely tropical weather conditions, the cultural value of the forest in indigenous societies in Cameroon takes precedence over all other landscape features, because it defines their existence and shapes the people’s culture.

The Crown of Thorns, Asong’s most popular novel, is very much a postcolonial narrative, set historically within the first decade of Anglophone Cameroon’s independence from British colonial rule in 1961. It is an indictment against the disordering of the jungle in postcolonial Cameroon, in which ontological principles binding man and the natural environment are contravened. Such contravention of indigenous peoples’ ecocultural spaces are masterminded by Father Preston and the District Officer, who embody the legacies of colonization seen in their appropriation of natives’ land and the destruction of the links between indigenous cultural values and the environment. This is an enterprise which, as Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin identify, is pervasive across postcolonies and intended to serve the economic interests of the West (Huggan and Tiffin, 2010: 27).

One of Asong’s major concerns is the breach in the cyclic trinity, which, until the advent of colonization, existed between the indigenes, the spiritual realm, and the environment. The book avers that precolonial Cameroonians understood the precarious nature of their environment and sought to live in harmony with it through ritual enactment. While the landscape remains perilous and requires a permanent spiritual entente through rituals, the “sacred grove” is in itself symbolic, representing the spiritual realm of the forest. It is intrinsically responsible for the existential balance of the people of Nkokonoko Small Monje. Apart from spiritual exigencies which inform the cultural context of the novel, Asong’s work, in the larger context of Cameroonian literature, reveals that however perilous the forest environment may appear, humans inexorably rely on it for existence.

“Equilibrium” is a central theme that emerges from the narrative. In order to maintain a spiritual equilibrium with the forest ecological environment surrounding the village, the local people designate part of the forest as the sacred grove otherwise known as the “sacred forest”. Symbolically, the grove is a place for initiations and spiritual atonement; it is the life force of the people and their culture. The enthronement of the new chief is completed with initiation rites in the “holy grove” in front of the statue near the River of Forgetfulness. The initiation rites additionally introduce the new chief to the patterns of atonement rituals which he is required to perform regularly as acts of communion between the living and the ancestors, the people and their forest environment. In some African societies the chiefs and prominent members of the community are buried in designated parts of the sacred grove (Ephirim-Donkor, 2013: 142), sometimes also labelled the “ancestral grove”. Furthermore, serious offences committed against the tribe are resolved in the sacred grove. As in the case of The Crown of Thorns, the “River of Forgetfulness” which runs through the sacred grove plays a symbolic role of expiation and cleansing, opening the path for new beginnings. Nchindia, the new ruler of Nkokonoko Small Monje, is expected to be cleansed in the river as part of the initiation ritual of the crowning ceremony. He is told by the leader of the Council of Elders: “That is The River of Forgetfulness. There we shall wash away all your past” (Asong, 1995: 59). ¹ The ritual is essential for the transformation of the chief from his former self to one with royal responsibility and authority.

Understanding that the forest environment is precarious, the inhabitants of Nkokonoko Small Monje attribute certain symbolic values to it as a means of maintaining a spiritual as well as physical equilibrium. This is achieved through the veneration of Akeukeuor, a giant statue carved from a tree that has mystical value and is ranked highest in the hierarchical order of the gods of the tribe. To the villagers, the “god of gods” of the tribe is a symbol of the forest that has mediating force between man and that environment. It is placed in the core of the forest — the “sacred grove” or “sacred forest” — and covered with a black cloth. The anticipated spiritual stability, however, is unattainable because nature itself is sinister and capable of disintegrating human society by exploiting the human tendency for greed. Such greed is manifested by the neocolonial agents, as represented by the District Officer who misleads the villagers into choosing the wrong ruler. In the context of Asong’s novel, it is generally believed that thwarting the will of an ancestor, especially in terms of succession, is most often responsible for the chaotic atmosphere within the human environment. Also culpable are the appropriation of the natives’ lands by the District Officer and Father Preston without consideration for the natives’ cosmic relations with them, and the theft of Akeukeuor, the spiritual symbol of the tribe, which is sold to Virchow, a white merchant.

The disruption of equilibrium begins with the thwarting of the will of succession to the throne of Nkokonoko Small Monje that had been destined for Antony Nkoaleck, in favour of Alexander Nchindia, through the machinations of neocolonial administrators. The indifferent Nchindia holds the Council of Elders in contempt, refusing to perform the rituals which are necessary for the harmonious communion between the people, their gods, and the spiritual environment which the jungle (forests) very much embodies. At a climactic moment of the plot, the giant statue is stolen from its shrine in the sacred grove with the complicity of the District Officer. The disappearance of the statue is a shocking incident that causes Ngobefuo, the leader of the Council of Elders, to subvert the ritualistic order that is usually performed before interacting within the sacred grove:

It was the custom that any entrance into the holy grove and shrine must be preceded by some ritual — amongst other things, the dancing forward and backward of two masquerades, each holding a flaming torch, amidst other formalities. But Ngobefuo, to Achiebefuo’s astonishment, ignored all ceremony and virtually strolled into the place. (30)

A feeling of exasperation, even unease, is evident here, highlighting the seriousness of the crime committed against the clan.

The entente between the people and their land thus breached, a series of conflicts surface amongst the Council of Elders, notably between Ngobefuo and Achiebefuo, between the Council of Elders and the chief, and between the villagers and the “foreign oppressors”, including the District Officer and Father Preston, leading to the casualties at the end of the novel. When the patriarch of the tribe, Ngobefuo, exclaims: “The bottom of our world has fallen out. Some among us have cut Akeukeuor and sold to the white man” (42), he is lamenting the broken link between the people and the potent spiritual value of the forests (Ambanasom, 2009b: 84), expressing also fear of impending chaos emanating from the broken link. The severity of the crime is more explicit when it is suspected that a prominent member of the Council of Elders is involved with the disappearance of the statue. Ngobefuo tells Achiebefuo: “Akeukeuor, the god of gods of the tribe of Nkokonoko Small Monje has been cut off and, stolen and sold to the white man. And all the fingers of this tribe are pointing at you” (26). At this point, Achiebefuo understands that he had been tricked by the District Officer into carving a statue similar to Akeukeuor which the District Officer used to replace the original statue in the holy grove. The severity of the act impels Achiebefuo’s guilt, causing him to commit suicide. The rupture in the community continues to widen with a confrontation between the Council of Elders and the Chief against the District Officer and Father Preston. Towards the end of the narrative, a bloodbath is envisaged, which is signalled by Asong’s description of the principal characters’ and their victims’ journey into the heart of the jungle:

In a ghastly silence Ngobefuo led the way in the long march. They followed a most complicated route, along winding paths, tumbling over rocks, resting from time to time and drinking some water and some palm wine, until they came to the entrance into an enormous cave near the summit of the highest ranges they had climbed. (196)

Symbolically, “the enormous cave” is at the core of the jungle’s sinister outlook. It is located in a distant forest where all those who conspire to desecrate the tribe by stealing the Akeukeuor are to be punished by death as part of a “ghoulish ritual” required for the cleansing of the tribe. The ritual turns into a fatal encounter between the villagers and the policemen dispatched by the District Officer, culminating in the deaths of a multitude of policemen and indigenous peoples. At this point the causality is no longer within the design of human reasoning. The executioners assume a kind of spirit possession emitted by the spiritual presences governing the jungle, extending its wrath over the human community. The pathetic statements uttered by Ngangabe at the end of the cleansing ritual: “We have lost our land […] We have lost our god […] We have lost our chief. And we have lost our brothers. All because of Goment [government]” (199) suggest the denouement’s tragic intensity. The violence moves away from the jungle to the home of the District Officer where his wife and three children are murdered, and to the office where the District Officer is hacked to pieces, while Father Preston escapes into the forest.

Asong’s narrative urges us to see the revenge enacted on the humans for upsetting the natural order of things, not as a consequence of a normal social disruption, but in Wole Soyinka’s terms of the “archetypal struggle of the mortal being against exterior forces” (1963: 43). The natives are aware that the ancestors and their gods need to be pacified and will stand with them: “Those who gave the land have not forgotten us” (212). Hence, the “us”, namely, the villagers, are aware of the support which their gods and ancestors will provide them to overcome “Goment”. The villagers’ justification for the “ghoulish ritual” is demonstrated in their anger against “Goment”: “They took our land, insulted us and turned our god into an object of trade”, they rant (211).

In order to portray the broken link between the people and their environment effectively, Asong employs a suitable metaphor drawn from his stock of forest imagery: “The Goment had put its hand between the tree and its bark” (85). Here, the “tree” represents the forest and the “bark” the people of Nkokonoko Small Monje. As such, the government is perceived as betraying a fundamental social tenet held by the community to be sacred. Asong’s characters’ longing to move out of socio-cosmological fragmentation towards a spiritual order which expresses the strength, validity, and safeguards of African life and culture through ritual enactment is affirmed. Asong considers rituals as symbolic expressions of actual social relations, the status and role of the individual in society being attained through a kind of cyclical trinity; that is, the union between man, his environment, and the spirits that inhabit that environment.

In the narrative, human greed is sanctioned by the spiritual forces that control nature. Thus the nadir of Asong’s The Crown of Thorns is not just about the problem of succession, but it also problematizes human greed and the awful consequences for humans and for their relationship with the forest environment. The work, then, is an account of the impact of colonial history on the environment and the casualties involved when humans interfere with a natural world that has its own distinctive values.

In Asong’s novel, the cosmic structure of the forest provides a place for atonement, reconciliation, and a harmonious existence with global nature. There humans coexist peacefully with nature by upholding spiritual values, because nature is perilous and so ineffable principles need to be attained through rituals. As in many African societies, the sacred grove is the most revered and protected part of the forest because it expresses the psychological, moral, and spiritual conditions which govern humans and their environment. In African literature some trees are believed to have lives of their own. They are perceived as abodes for spiritual forces. This point is made explicit by Wole Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests, in which trees are held sacred and portrayed as possessing souls as in the following stage directions:

A tree trunk to one side of the scene. Murete, a tree demon, is about to come out of it when he hears some noise. Ducks back. Enter Aroni, the one-legged. He looks as if he is going to hop right past the tree when he stops suddenly and gives it a stout wallop. The tree demon yelps. (Soyinka: 1963: 9)

Despite its highly symbolic structuring, Soyinka’s play tacitly incorporates the pan-African worldview that trees are dwelling places for potent spiritual powers in African mythology. The “dance” in A Dance of the Forests is presented as a ritual in which “human beings, ancestral spirits, Gods and Nature Gods all come together and actually get involved in the affairs of the human world” (Isha, 2012: 9).

The forest setting of Nkokonoko Small Monje is of great significance in understanding the nature/culture binary since the tribe’s spiritual system is essentially influenced by it. The tribe is surrounded by thick awful forests with caves, ponds, and the “River of Forgetfulness” proffering a forest ecosphere that is both revered and feared. At this point, Asong’s critical consciousness reveals the duality of the forests by the sacred and secular qualities attached to it. The forest is not always a locus for atonement and spiritual effervescence. It is also a place for the malevolent. Much of the narrative focuses on the human settlement whose existentialist prerogatives are determined by the forest landscape surrounding it. As already stated, the narrative’s major conflict is ignited by the denigration of the sacred grove which is the sacred core of the forest. The spiritual potency of Akeukeuor, the “God of gods” of Nkokonoko Small Monje, is enshrined in the forest region as a metaphor for harmonious spiritual coalescing of the people, the forest, and the entire landscape. Human existence in this ecosphere and the degree of the fatality of man’s relation to it is determined by the spiritual influences within it.

Aside from the sacred grove, some parts of the forests, generally known as the “evil forests”, are in themselves sinister or offer potential danger to those that inhabit them. Here, people who die of strange diseases and those who commit suicide or die after committing heinous crimes against the tribe are buried. Antony Nkoaleck, the rightful heir to the throne of Nkokonoko Small Monje, is outmanoeuvred by the natives through the influence of the District Officer. Ironically, he is projected as being a “curse” and rejected by the tribe, and eventually he dies out of frustration and disappointment:

Whatever the cause of his death, Antony had not been buried by the tribe. He had been taken by a team of hired mourners to an obscure corner in the forest and buried. This shameful burial, the President of the tribesmen said, was supposed to serve as a very good lesson for those who were still growing up. (118)

The circumstances surrounding Antony’s death and his burial may be seen to effect a backlash on the tribe. The rapid disintegration of the human community sense of harmony is an act of retributive justice, whereby the forest-spirits express anger at the unjustified humiliation of one rightfully initiated to be the spiritual custodian of the land.

The forests are an incarnation not just of the trees but aspects of the landscape which owe their existence to the forests, like the River of Forgetfulness, the pond, and the caves which are inhabited by spiritual beings. The ponds (“ateungs”) and the caves in Asong’s work are places imbued with spiritual potency and only those who have been initiated can venture into them. Father Preston, who harangues the traditional doctors for their spiritual practices, is said to be an “embarrassment” to the people by “entering the ateungs and coming out unscathed and without the traditional Ntoe being squeezed into his eyes” (83). The “traditional Ntoe” is a ritual performed by squeezing herbs into the eyes as a prerequisite for venturing into the sinister realm of the ecosphere. Such rituals are transcendental in that they transform the mortal being to the spiritual through spirit possession, thus reaffirming the relation of man to the gods (Harrison, 1982: 55). The operative word here is “man”, for the society of The Crown of Thorns is predominantly a patriarchal one. This explains the absence of women in the sinister realm of the ecosphere, but leaves questions unanswered as to the viability of the dialogic relationship between humans and their environment, which seems to be Asong’s main concern in the work. In controversies and conflicts that ensue in the heart of the jungle, women are kept in the background and only the District Officer’s wife, who is a passive victim of jungle (in)justice, is briefly mentioned in the narrative as follows: “Seized with an evil mania, the wicked frenzy of a man who had on his mind a load of a century’s grievances to shake off at one blow, Ngangabe raised his club and brought it down on the woman” (201). Her brutal murder alongside those of her children and husband is an extension of the frenzy which takes control of the jungle at the end of the novel.

Precolonial Cameroonians understood the spiritual implications of the forests and their deterministic value to their wellbeing and sought to conserve their cultural landscape as a source of livelihood through its spiritual realm and cultural symbols. Therefore, interfering with the sacred forest, the evil forest, or specific aspects of the landscape such as ponds, lakes, and caves procures for its victims serious consequences for humanity. Asong’s novel therefore creates a world in which human dependence on the forest is inevitable, yet because of its fatal nature he attaches spiritual significance to the forest in order to maintain an equilibrium. The natives’ attempts to appease the forests which sustain their lives are frustrated by human greed, leading to serious consequences at the novel’s end.

Asong joins other African postcolonial writers including Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and J. M. Coetzee, to problematize environmental degradation and its impact on indigenous cultures due to neo-imperialist consumer culture. In reading Asong’s The Crown of Thorns, it becomes evident that Cameroonians, to use Karen Litfin’s expression, are an “integral part of a participatory universe” (2010: 117) that conditions human existence and links them with the cosmos. Moreover, the dichotomy between indigenous peoples’ and colonials’ view of the jungle is everywhere evident in The Crown of Thorns. The locals’ affection for and attachment to the forest stands in stark contrast to the colonizers’ degradation of the environment without any consideration of its implications for folk cultural prerogatives. Thus, in the Cameroonian context, the forest becomes a metaphor for the dialogic relationships between nature and culture, between humans and their environment.

Meira Chand’s novel, A Different Sky, set during the Second World War, is probably the first historical fiction to emerge out of Singapore. There have been several works dealing with Singaporean history, such as Philip Jeyaretnam’s novel, Abraham’s Promise (1995), a thinly veiled political satire about individuals whose lives are caught up in the tangles of history. There have also been historical narratives, such as Singapore’s first prime minister Lee Kuan Yew’s account of Singapore’s development, From Third World to First (2000) or his earlier The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (1998). However, if we define historical fiction in Sarah Johnson’s words as “set before the middle of the last [twentieth] century […] in which the author is writing from research rather than personal experience” (Johnson, 2005: 1), then none of the above works except Meira Chand’s would qualify as historical fiction. In Chand’s carefully researched historical fiction, A Different Sky, as in Asong’s The Crown of Thorns, the forest becomes the conduit though which a dialogic relationship between nature and culture is established. However, the forest is presented in a very complex manner in the text. Nature and culture are shown to be constantly interacting. However, predictably, even the nebulous concord established during peace times between these binaries comes undone during wars and civil dissension, resulting in there being very little harmony in the interaction. Nature remains intractable and man’s efforts to conquer it appear puny, even comical.

A Different Sky narrates an account of a relatively less explored segment of Second World War history: the Southeast Asian theatre of war. The novel begins with the well-documented communist riot of 1927 and is set in the years before this erstwhile British colony achieved full independence. The plot is divided into four parts dealing with specific periods that cover significant historical developments. Part 1 covers the period from 1927–1937; Part 2, 1940–41; Part 3, 1941–1946; Part 4, 1946–1956. The plotline traces the lives of three families caught up in the tumultuous events of the Japanese occupation and the fall of British colonialism. It ends with the pro-independence rallies during the Malayan Emergency in the mid-1950s. It is here that all the principal players of the plot — Rose Burns and her son Howard, of Eurasian descent; Mei Lan, a Chinese girl with her amah, or nurse, Ah Siew; a young Indian trader, Raj Sherma, and Joseph Ho, an urbane Chinese entrepreneur — come together as passengers seated in a trolley brought to a standstill by angry demonstrators. Though these characters are fictional, the historical backdrop is authentic and indeed carefully reconstructed from historical archives. This historical fiction narrates a history from below, focusing on powerless, marginalized characters. It is no wonder, then, that “nature”, traditionally relegated to the sidelines in historical accounts, should also occupy a significant place in this novel.

Throughout the narrative, nature, particularly forests, functions as a predominant geographical feature that actively plays a role in war activities but is also present as a pervasive metaphor. In tropical Singapore, nature, rampant and lush, is always waiting in the wings to swallow up the ramparts of civilization. Rose Burns, the landlady of Belvedere, a lodging house for Europeans, is only too aware of this continual fight to keep nature at bay. Showing her new lodger Wilfrid Patterson his room, she remarks, “[t]his time of year we have the monsoon. The rain comes down suddenly and if it’s at night you’ll have to let down the chiks yourself, otherwise the room will be drenched” (Chand, 2010: 83). ²

Having spent his childhood in Malaya, Wilfred is no stranger to the visible potency of nature, especially as it manifests itself in the tropics. He recalls a trek through the Malayan rubber estate with his father when he was a boy. The “oozing wounds of the rubber trees” (121) that he describes seem to pre-empt his own misery, when “[h]is mother’s death from a snake-bite a short while later” (121) sends him back to Britain. His mother’s death was followed by his father’s, who “died of cholera one year later” (121). Thus forests are presented as actively malign and as impacting negatively on human, specifically familial, harmony.

In the Southeast Asian context, the war between nature and culture is a familiar one. In Jini Kim Watson’s view, Southeast Asian nations like Singapore, Korea, and Taiwan have “transformed themselves into the most successful of newly industrializing countries via a fundamental rearrangement of urban and national space that had begun in the colonial period” (2011: 4). In Singapore and greater Malaya, right from the early colonial era, the disequilibrium between individual and nature was generated by a relentless thrust for greater industrialization of its landscape. As a frontier economy, Malaya was vulnerable, since political control of trade in forest resources was a major prerogative of political power. In the above passage from A Different Sky, for example, Wilfred’s childhood history is inextricably linked to the Malayan rubber estates carved out of the tropical rainforests and to the production of rubber that was central to the British colonial economy in Malaya. As Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells points out:

In Southeast Asia, environmental vulnerability is exacerbated by the region’s wealth in natural resources and its potential for exploitation by a fast-expanding population within the context of modern capitalist development. (1998: 918)

With these historical developments in mind, the polarities between jungle and cityscape are intricately negotiated in the novel. As events unfold, the cultural space of the island city is rendered passive through repeated conquests, and it emerges as a dormant space where imperialism and racism are practised, first by the British and then by the Japanese, both of whom exploit the land and its people. Viewed through the eyes of the defeated, the city operates as a space of failure and impotence. In contrast, the descriptions of the natural world present it as impregnable and unconquerable. As Brokentooth leads Howard escaping from the Japanese into the communist camp in the jungle, it becomes a place of refuge. However, the jungle is also a space that seems beyond human ken. Howard is awestruck by the immensity and grandeur of nature:

The moon hung low, lighting a narrow path of silver over the dark oily skin of the sea […] only the boat ploughing the water broke the silence of the vast and empty darkness, with the moon their only light. The night swallowed everything, and he felt his smallness on the limitless ocean. Here, existence and death seemed of no more consequence than the breaking of a wave upon the shore and he shivered with new terror. (275–6)

Howard’s response to nature is immediate and profound and points both to his essentially urban existence thus far and his distance from nature. Howard becomes a precursor of the over-civilized inhabitants of later, heavily urbanized, Southeast Asia.

Nonetheless, this does not mean that Chand constructs nature as an “idyllic other”. William Cronon, an ecocritic, derides some nature-writers for upholding a simplistic view of nature. He observes that for them:

Wilderness is the natural, unfallen antithesis of an unnatural civilisation that has lost its soul. It is a place of freedom in which we can recover our true selves we have lost to the corrupting influences of our artificial lives. Most of all, it is the ultimate landscape of authenticity. (1996: 80)

Cronon finds this kind of idealism rather tedious. Chand’s narrative in A Different Sky, however, driven as it is by the facts of history, does not build human life in the tropical rainforests as in any way a tranquil retreat from the travails of civilization. The forests are no doubt vibrantly beautiful and their beauty is enticing:

They were now on a high ridge and either side of them the jungle rolled steeply away in a vista of blue-green slopes. A fast-running stream crashed over the ridge and disappeared into a long waterfall, foaming and pounding into the lush emerald forest a great distance below. (278)

That said, this vibrant splendour is duplicitous. As Howard treks through the dense vegetation with Brokentooth, “[h]e was sweating profusely, and his limbs, covered by insect bites, itched unbearably” (277). The essential inhospitableness of the forest that is to be his home — his refuge from the punitive Japanese army — is brought home to him in no uncertain terms. Neither is the wilderness a sublime other, a place of quietude and solace. On the contrary, in the rainforests,

[t]he light was suffused and gloomy; mist rose from the thick mulch of rotting leaves, fallen trees and branches that covered the jungle floor. […] At times the forest canopy fused above them and light almost disappeared, as if they had entered a cave. Then, the sun when glimpsed around the edge of the jungle, appeared like the distant glow of a lamp and the shrieks of birds took on a menacing edge. There were sounds all around them in this primordial forest: the crash of a broken branch, the calls of animals or birds or the knocking of a wood-pecker. (277)

Chand depicts the forest as noisy and menacing and Howard is aware that beneath its majesty lies a landscape that is hostile to human habitation — “he saw the black leeches clinging to his legs, fat slugs the size of his thumb, bloated with his blood” (278); “Mosquitoes kept their distance while the fire smoked, but when it died down and they lay in the hut, the insects swarmed viciously about them” (279); Wee Jack, the communist, who has retreated with his followers to escape the Japanese, “had several suppurating jungle sores on his arms and legs” (280). Additionally, Howard “had learned from Cynthia [his sister and a nurse] the ailments of the jungle: malaria, beriberi, scabies and other uncomfortable skin diseases” (283). These sketches, which present the unvarnished conditions of life in the jungle, drive home in realistic terms the far-from-idyllic conditions in tropical rainforests. Here, unlike in the cities, nature refuses to be colonized, but instead asserts its autonomy. As in Asong’s novel, this land is marked by human habitation in another singular way in that it is presented as an exclusive male domain. But this is not a triumphant association. On the contrary, the rapport established by men with nature appears at best uneasy and at worst, dismal.

The exclusion of women from a tough terrain and its construction as a male domain is not unique to this text but is a trope in certain literary genres. Throughout Howard’s stay in the jungle there is no overt mention of women who reside in the camp except as shadowy figures in the background. It appears that Wee Jack’s communist–egalitarianism stops short of gender equality. Even courageous women like Mei Lan or Cynthia never operate outside the city. This exclusion creates a literary topos that aligns these sections of the novel to the American Western genre. As feminists point out, this quintessentially “male genre” works on certain sublimated assumptions that ally woman to nature, unproblematically bestowing “success” on the man who subordinates both. In such narratives “man” emerges as the (only) agent of change. This trope is also entirely predictable given the colonial context, for postcolonial critics like Anne McClintock discuss how colonial powers both feminized and eroticized the tropics, constructing the “pornotropics” with the male as the sole master (McClintock, 1995: 22). Thus nature and women were both eroticized and considered legitimately exploitable. This “male power fantasy”, to use Edward Said’s phrase (1979: 207), had a major disadvantage since caught up in their fantasy, European males were distanced from the realities of nature both discursively and conceptually.

The text reveals the way in which these perspectives were mirrored in practice through its repetition of an oft-cited historical fact about how, before the Japanese occupation, the British colonial government seriously misunderstood and hence mismanaged the natural boundaries of the forest and ocean while planning the War. They did not understand how to safeguard themselves either by using the jungles in the north or the seas in the south — a historical testament to the European male’s distance from the natural elements that surrounded him in tropical Malaya. This is often given as a key reason why the British army and its allies were decimated in Singapore. Their distance from these ecosystems was also reflected by the impractical war machinery that was sent over from Europe. In the narrative, when Wilfred goes to interview a British officer, Jenkins, who is more familiar with the tropical fauna, he expresses despair about the inappropriate armaments that are being transported to them: “That’s the kind of nonsense they send us from Whitehall. They might need tanks in the desert, but what would we do with them here? How would a tank get through 700 miles of Malayan jungle?” he mourns (176).

When the Japanese invade, Howard, despite feeling resentment towards the British colonials, decides to volunteer for army service. When he is thrust into real combat just one week later, the paltriness of human endeavour and the pervasive power of nature is brought home to him:

The darkness was constant. The path entered a patch of secondary jungle and Howard stumbled along with his group. The smell of the sea and the thick odour of the mud enclosed them. Soon, cold water splashed unexpectedly about his ankles and Howard saw they were in mangrove swamps where they must tread carefully amongst tangled root and debris. (204)

By dawn, the Japanese Army vanquishes the entire British/Australian and the volunteer Singapore forces. An exhausted Howard, who appears to be the lone survivor, opens his eyes to view the carnage:

Here and there Howard saw Japanese corpses, shaven headed and still clutching their bayonets, their short legs in bound puttees. He staggered forward and almost immediately saw Ravi lying dead, staring open-eyed into the sun. A bayonet had sliced his belly and his innards were spilt out over his uniform in a dried mass of dull grey rope. A fiddler crab traversed his chest waving its one great claw. Flies settled crustily over the entrails, buzzing excitedly. (207)

The passage creates a lasting impression of the transient and puny might of man, even at his most vicious, when set beside the enduring, albeit quotidian, power of the natural world. A dialectic set-up between the human-centred cultural world and the supremely indifferent natural world is held in tight tension throughout the section in which Chand describes Howard’s incarceration with the communists in the Malayan jungle.

In Ecocriticism, Greg Garrard contends that nature has been repeatedly figured as a retreat from the “moral and material pollution of the city” (2004: 59). Stacy Alaimo reiterates this perspective in her book Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space:

Nature provides a kind of cultural authority because it is positioned as a world apart, unsullied by human motivations and the changing contingencies of history. Culture maps nature simultaneously onto and against itself; nature serves both as boundary and as bounded space, as an outside that constitutes the terrain of the inside. (2000: 106–7)

From these viewpoints, nature is primarily projected as culture’s other, an untainted space. However, as Alaimo further clarifies, from the beginning of the twentieth century there has also been a parallel tradition of politicizing nature. Citing Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth journal project and Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio among others, Alaimo analyses the politically charged disputes over “‘wilderness’, ‘nature’ and the ‘natural’” (Alaimo, 2000: 94) and details how natural spaces were discursively co-opted into cultural politics so as to garner support for women’s ideological movements. In this way, these naturescapes became imbued with symbolic significance. It appears as if Alaimo’s idea is in some sense literalized in Chand’s historical novel. In the text the jungle becomes a locus that binds together two contrary positions — symbolically as a refuge and literally as a political space. Howard, evicted by the Japanese Army out of their house named “Belvedere”, recalls a moment when it appears that both the warmongering political powers and the less-than-munificent natural world are conjoining to “other” the human:

Before him the waves crashed and receded. Three days earlier he had stood on the damp sand with people from the estate, staring silently at a swollen body washed up under the palms. The man’s hands were tied behind his back, sharks had savaged his torso and a bullet hole scarred his forehead (254)

The corpse has been ravaged by both man and nature, bearing the imprint of deliberate human malevolence as well as nature’s involuntary molestation, both of which appear antagonistic forces. Thus, when his sister, Cynthia, anxious about Howard’s safety, persuades him to hide in the jungle with the injunction, “Brokentooth will take you into the jungle, to their camp. You’ll be safe there” (274), the words do not strike either Howard or indeed the reader as particularly reassuring. Just as the male colonial is alienated from nature, so too is effete, urbanized Howard. Furthermore, nature here is ideologically saturated. Various political identities have been inscribed on it in assorted ways. Early on, when a wounded Howard is tended by the Malay couple, Abdullah and Ayesha, in a remote hut in the middle of the Malayan jungle, Abdullah clarifies that he is pro-Japanese:

The Japanese support the efforts of our Kesatuan Melayu Muda ³ because they believe in a free Asia. They wanted KMM members to accompany the Japanese army down the peninsula and liaise with our Malay people for them, helping to make good relations. (212)

Abdullah informs Howard that the Japanese are aware of his jungle hideout and are happy to promote the Malay cause in order to construct a more egalitarian Asia. But Wee Jack, leader of the communist movement, sets up camp in the jungles to hide from the Japanese and holds the fort there. Indeed, located in a clearing hacked from the encompassing vegetation, the camp is guarded like a military fortress. When Brokentooth and Howard reach the camp, “[a] sentry with a machine gun stopped them as they approached. ‘Password’, he shouted” (279). In Wee Jack’s communist hideout, Howard feels an outsider alienated both by the harsh conditions of the jungle and by the ideologies spouted by the camp members. Constantly surrounded by them, the wilderness does not provide Howard with the solitude he longs for. Young Brokentooth informs him with insouciance that “[p]rivacy was a bourgeois concept that pandered to an individual’s ego” (281).

Nature therefore becomes a contested site, existing as “unheimlich” space, as exterior and separate, and also as refuge. We are told that “[t]he Japanese were constantly searching for guerrilla camps and they lived in apprehension of an attack” (282). Howard himself is aware that he is being watched by Wee Jack and his men and realizes that they see him not only as an outsider but “as soft, indulged and decadent and that they were waiting to deride him, to break him down” (282). Howard appears to be an example of Theodore Roosevelt’s “overcivilized man, who has lost the great fighting masterful virtues” (1967: 150). He is only too aware of this himself and contrasts his own weakness to Brokentooth’s strength: “The boy’s resourcefulness and stamina made Howard ashamed of his own weak limbs and thimbleful of energy” (277–8). Finally, the contrast between Howard and Wee Jack’s men cannot be overstated. Despite their suppurating sores and malaria, these men ranged themselves as the archetypal conquerors of elemental nature, making themselves as much at home in this inhospitable terrain as it permits. They lay claim to the wilderness in order to reassure themselves of their power to dominate.

The forest emerges as a veritable breeding ground for machismo. The contrast between the men’s weak physique and their macho posturing appears at one level comic. But at another level, the jungle also becomes a place where the pettiness of human behaviour stands exposed. For Wee Jack and his crew of communist rebels, the Malayan jungle becomes a place in which to play out — even while repressing — their political anxieties; Howard, with his urban sophistication, becomes a legitimate target. As Judith Butler argues, “the recourse to a position […] that places itself beyond the play of power, and which seeks to establish the metapolitical basis for a negotiation of power relations is perhaps the most insidious ruse of power” (1992: 6). Wee Jack fits Butler’s description about the misuse of power. While claiming to be fighting for the rights of underdogs, Wee Jack does not appear to realize that his maltreatment of Howard is an unethical use of his power. On the contrary, he seems to think that his actions are above scrutiny. In this, Wee Jack exposes the darker side of his communist idealism. Power seduces Wee Jack and despite his regular spouting of egalitarian Marxist ideals, his avarice for power is exposed. The Malayan jungle sojourn becomes a way of providing a glimpse into an “alter-history” of Singapore — the “what-if-the-communists-had-come-to-power” scenario that pre-Republican (indeed, even current-day) Singaporeans are constantly warned about. Hence, the land outside of civilization becomes a dominant trope in the book.

In fact, both novels demonstrate how space and power are closely interrelated and cannot be separated. Asong’s forest is “sacred ground” closely tied to rituals of power. This space sanctions acts such as ritual killings, which would, elsewhere, be considered as criminal acts. Similarly, Chand’s forests are held by rebels such as Wee Jack, who rule like despots over their patch of the forest, persuading themselves that their cruel actions are necessary for a better tomorrow and hence are above the law. Thus the ideological spaces of the mind and the physical space of the inhospitable forests appear to operate with a strange synergy. The French Marxist philosopher, Henri Lefebvre, analyses space extensively in his book The Production of Space (1991). Lefebvre seeks to reconcile mental space and physical space. In doing so, he mediates between abstract and conceptual reflections of the meaning of space to its experience in the normal everyday life of home and city. Gottdiener discusses Lefebvre’s concept of space as “both a material product and a manifestation”. He notes the complex relationship between space, power, and the reproduction of social relations. Lefebvre’s work revolutionized urban sociology by introducing the notion that “space is both a medium of social relations and a material product that can affect social relations” (Gottdiener, 1993: 132). We find that both texts demonstrate the truth of this observation.

In comparing the Cameroonian novel with the fiction from Singapore, two complex tapestries of representation emerge. For both novels, forests play a significant role in both the literal and symbolic realms, demonstrating the dialogic nature of the relationship between man and his environment. In both texts forests are featured as both geographical entities and metaphorical constructs. But while in The Crown of Thorns the symbolic significance of nature overrides its geographical identity, in A Different Sky, the geographical realities are primary, giving rise to its symbolic associations, which become secondary. Both postcolonial texts attest to the fact that the nature/culture binary is primal, permeates all cultures and can no longer be ignored or sidelined in literary analyses.