Llyod Fernando

Life Of Llyod Fernando

Lloyd Fernando was born to a Sinhalese family in Sri Lanka in 1926. In 1938, his family migrated to Singapore. Mr. Fernando was educated at St Patrick’s in Singapore, with the Japanese occupation interrupting that education from 1943 to 1945. During the Japanese attack on Singapore, Mr. Fernando’s father was killed. During the Japanese occupation, Fernando worked in a variety of manual labor jobs.

Lloyd Fernando thereafter graduated from the University of Malaya in Singapore, and subsequently served as an instructor at the Singapore Polytechnic. Lloyd Fernando became an assistant lecturer at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur in 1960. Mr. Fernando was awarded a scholarship at Leeds University, UK where he received his PhD.

In 1967 Fernando was appointed to serve as a professor at the English Department of the University of Malaya, where he served until his retirement in 1978. Subsequently, Mr. Fernando studied law at City University in the United Kingdom and then at Middle Temple, returning to Malaysia with two law degrees, whereupon he was employed by a law firm, and thereafter started a separate law practice business. In 1997, Mr. Fernando had a stroke and ceased his professional activities

Literary work

·         Scorpion orchid, 1976

·         Cultures in Conflict, 1986

·         Green is the color, 1993

·         Twenty-two Malaysian Stories: an anthology of writing of writing in English  (editor)

·         “New Women" in the Late Victorian Novel, 1977

Scorpion Orchid

It is a novel by Llyod Fernando, first published by Heinemann Educational Books(Asia) in 1976. The novel is set in Singapore in the 1950s.

Summary of Scorpion Orchid

•Set in 1950’s Singapore – a time of racial tension and nationalistic uprising
•Theme of national birth and the anxieties present regarding racial conflict and ethnic self interest

SYNOPSIS

An exciting first novel set in pre-independence Singapore. Scorpion Orchid follows the lives of four young men—a Malay, an Eurasian, a Chinese and a Tamil—against a backdrop of racial violence and political factions struggling for dominance. Excerpts from classical Malay and colonial English sources appear throughout the narrative, illuminating the roots and significance of this period in history.

THE TEXT AS METAPHOR

•Text is a metaphor for growth of a new nation •The four young men gain a new awareness of their ethnic identities as the negotiate the race riots that destroy their complacent sense of camaraderie •The new awareness is central to their transition from adolescence to adult life •Represents the Malayan society and the transition between former tolerance and present assertiveness

•Scorpion Orchid generally preserves an allegorical distance between the personal and the political. • The personal and the political develop along parallel lines and mirror one another, and when they do intersect they remain clearly defined

CHARACTERS

•Santi, a Tamil Indian, Sabran, a Malay, Guan Kheng, a Chinese, and Peter, a Eurasian.
•Santinathan – Indian, refuses to observe conventions of university life, gets expelled – ends up as village schoolteacher
•Sabran – Malay, involved in politics, gets arrested and his future prospects somewhat set back considerably •Sabran reflects on his family in the kampung (village) that has sacrificed for his education and which exerts a strong emotional pull on him, but is in no position to offer him either comfort or advice.
•Guan Kheng – Chinese, comes from wealthy family, feels betrayed by the Malays who suddenly consider him a foreigner. Peter D’Almeida – Eurasian, confused about his identity, loses faith in ‘new’ Singapore, emigrates to England after he is beaten up in a riot (comes back at the end)
•Sally – uncertain ethnic background and origin, works at a hawker stall, part time prostitute, has an ambiguous relationship with all four men involving sex, money and love, although they pay her for sex she is treated as a friend.

SUMMARY OF GREEN IS THE COLOR

    Lloyd Fernando's Green is the Color is a very interesting novel. The country is still scarred by violence, vigilante groups roam the countryside, religious extremists set up camp in the hinterland, there are still sporadic outbreaks of fighting in the city, and everyone, all the time, is conscious of being watched. It comes as some surprise to find that the story is actually a contemporary reworking of a an episode from the Misa Melayu, an 18th century classic written by Raja Chulan. In this climate of unease, Fernando employs a multi-racial cast of characters.

     At the centre of the novel there's a core of four main characters, good (if idealistic)young people who cross the racial divide to become friends, and even fall in love. There's Dahlan, a young lawyer and activist who invites trouble by making impassioned speech on the subject of religious intolerance on the steps of a Malacca church; his friend from university days, Yun Ming, a civil servant working for the Ministry of Unity who seeks justice by working from within the government. The most fully realized character of the novel is Siti Sara, and much of the story is told from her viewpoint. A sociologist and academic, she's newly returned from studies in America where she found life much more straightforward, and trapped in a loveless marriage to Omar, a young man much influenced by the Iranian revolution who seeks purification by joining religious commune.

    The hungry passion between Yun Ming and Siti - almost bordering on violence at times and breaking both social and religious taboos - is very well depicted. Like the others, Sara is struggling to make sense of events :Nobody could get may sixty-nine right, she thought. It was hopeless to pretend you could be objective about it. speaking even to someone close to you, you were careful for fear the person might unwittingly quote you to others. if a third person was present, it was worse, you spoke for the other person's benefit. If hews Malay you spoke one way, Chinese another, Indian another. even if he wasn’t listening. in the end the spun tissue, like an unsightly scab, became your vision of what happened; the wound beneath continued to run pus. Although the novel is narrated from a third person viewpoint, it is curious that just one chapter is narrated by Sara's father, one of the minor characters, an elderly village imam and a man of great compassion and insight.