Maternity was never a private event in the Malay world. Manderson (1998:
28) informs that Malay maternity is shaped by “imbrications of ideologies of motherhood, empire and medicine”. Similarly, Maila Stivens (1996; 1998; 2007) has written extensively about the various structures that have come to lay their claim over Malay maternal bodies. She identified Islam, adat (Malay culture) in the form of “advice givers” and the state in the guise of medicine as the main elements that influence Malay women‟s maternity decisions (Stivens, 2007: 30).
They simultaneously create intersecting and opposing ideas surrounding maternity and motherhood.
22
Wazir Jahan Karim (1992) discusses how adat shapes Malay gender identity. Malay maternity is framed in the Malay culture as an exclusively female enterprise (Stivens, 1996). The female kin is the agents of Malay cultural control over the maternal body. Therefore, together with the female village midwife, the women‟s female community is involved in dispensing advice and influencing a Malay maternal woman‟s bodily conduct. However, both Laderman (1983) and Stivens (1996) noted how the power of the female kin and therefore adat has begun to wane with the advent of medicalization and the Islamic resurgence.
The edging out of the female kin‟s role in the maternity enterprise first began during the colonial era. The veneration of scientific knowledge in industrial England had resulted in the colonial state‟s “discovery of the child” (Manderson, 1998: 28). Consequently, this caused the state to increase its surveillance on the act of mothering. The mother was viewed by the colonial state as primarily responsible in maintaining the health and safety of the child. Various policies and schemes claimed at benefitting the colonized woman and her child were then introduced. Manderson (1998: 26) postulates that this gave rise to the
“medicalization of mothering” whereby mothering practices and behaviours were framed, judged and subjected to medical scrutiny. The medical service became the state‟s frontline emissary to question native women‟s „natural‟ ability to mother. The village bidan depicted as “stupid, ignorant, superstitious, dirty”
should then be squeezed out of the maternity process (Manderson, 1998: 31). She was a dangerous yet viable contender of the medical authorities for the
23
management of maternal bodies. In doing so, the state and its medical agents sought to become the only legitimate stakeholders who had a right to intervene in women‟s maternal practices.
According to Stivens (1996; 1998), this in turn has then influenced scholarly and literary depictions of Malay mothering practices (Stivens, 1996;
1998). Examining the works of Djamour (1965) and Firth (1966), she noticed how Malay mothers were pictured as altruistic, sentimental and backward by these scholars (Stivens, 1996; 1998). She then informs that such articulations remain salient in postcolonial Malaysia and Singapore as she saw how Malay mothers were continually reprimanded for the negative outcome of a child‟s upbringing by the state, academics, childcare experts and Malay popular media over the last century (Stivens, 2007).
As such, the postcolonial state has now taken over the surveillance of the Malay mother from the colonial state as they continue to generate state policies that reference women in their capacity as wives and mothers. Kelly Fu‟s (2005) study on the history of the management of childbirth in Singapore from the colonial to postcolonial era further indicates this. Fu (2005: 1) remarked that the movement from home births to hospital births was the result of the post-colonial Singapore “state‟s modernization agenda and the importance placed on science and technology in nation building discourses”. She continued that such an agenda
24
was based on the belief that home births are dangerous. This belief, she explained, was inherited from colonial thought. The modern Singaporean woman is to desire a sterilized hospital birth cared for by nurses and doctors and devoid of kin support. The eschewing of local midwifery for the safer, hospital birth by women brought with it the reduction in the female community‟s powers to shape women‟s maternity experiences (Fu, 2005). Nonetheless, Stivens (1996: 204) informed her readers that women from the older generation were able to carve out some form of power against state and medical incursions by providing young pregnant and parturient mothers “noisy directions” not to heed “government
„propaganda”. This contestation over the management of the female maternal body illustrates the complexity of the Malay maternity experience (Stivens, 1996).
In tracing the history of Malay women‟s maternities since the colonial period, scholars especially Stivens and Manderson aim to provide the reader with the political, social and cultural context in which Singaporean and Malaysian Malay women experience their maternities. In consequence, they highlighted the state, medicine, Islam and adat as the main protagonists in influencing Malay maternity. In order to come to this conclusion, they had to focus their research efforts on analyzing these structural entities. In so doing, Malay women‟s perspectives could not become the emphasis of their project. Any narrative of women‟s maternity experience was featured in reference to how the different structural forces have come to shape it. On the other hand, even if Malay women‟s voices were at the heart of their research project, women‟s perspectives
25
of their maternity were not the focus of their research. Manderson and Stivens acknowledge this. It was for this reason that they proposed the need for future research projects that pay attention to women‟s narratives of their maternal careers.
Nurhaizatul Jamila Jamil‟s (2009) thesis on Malay women further illuminates the potential that women‟s narrative studies have in broadening understanding on Malay women‟s lived experiences. Nurhaizatul (2009) wanted to get a grasp on how a strong Malay women‟s movement in the early history of Singapore became entirely non-existent in the last few decades. By analysing Malay women‟s narratives, she discovered how Malay women continued to have agency albeit in a different form. By exploring her informants‟ narrations of their embodied subjectivities, Nurhaizatul (2009: 104) uncovered how Malay women used their bodies to transform “themselves into willing subjects of a particular discourse” that frames the ideal Malay woman as a virtuous mother, wife and worker. Her work then stimulated my inquiry as to whether Malay women also have agency in light of a dominant discourse on Malay maternity. In order to do this I then have to look at Malay women‟s experiences via a different framework, away from structures and one that deals with experience, emotions and embodiment. Women‟s narratives of their maternal bodies then become the subject of my study. It is with this in mind that I ventured into the works of other scholars who explored maternal embodiment to frame my research questions.
26