Counter-narratives of the nation: Writing the modern brunei malay woman

Abstract

This chapter examines how young Malay women in Brunei Darussalam negotiate culturally different notions of gender identity and agency in changing, modernising social spaces through creative writing in English. Despite the ideological imperatives and regulating apparatuses of the nation-state, Brunei’s boundaries have nonetheless been rendered porous by the global cultural flows of media, people, capital, technology and ideology (Appadurai 1990). These flows have pervaded both social and cultural imaginaries, influencing a young generation of women in the way they perceive and represent modern Brunei Malay femininity; such representations can be found in female students’ contemporary creative writings at the local university. Linking modernity with the use of English, these students’ writings not only counter traditional norms and patriarchal views of Malay femininity encoded at state level, but also reflect how the process of creative writing constitutes a symbolic space of negotiation and exploration, a space in which Otherness or difference is embraced as essential to the idea of the modern Brunei Malay femininity.