Karen Lui

“You too can make history . . . write it down. Make it—” is one of the ways that novelist Vyvyane Loh spotlights the individual’s point of view with the second-person pronoun in Breaking the Tongue. The incomplete sentence encourages the reader to speculate on what has been redacted. Notably, it recalls Ezra Pound’s famous maxim, “Make it new,” his interpretation of a historical Chinese text titled Da Xue. The redaction also encourages a modernist re-examination of imperial history to uncover some of the once-silenced voices of the colonized. This modernist re-examination is part of the broader project of contemporary novelists such as Loh and Tan Twan Eng, namely the belated deployment of modernist poetics tactics, to intervene in the representation of history in Southeast Asia.