Let us eat rojak

MANGOSTEEN CRUMBLE by Charlene Rajendran (Team East, 1999, 81 pages)

First, the bad news: Mangosteen Crumble is out of print. You can’t get it for love or money in any bookshop here. Since this is one of the most interesting local poetry collections I have come across, the news is a crying shame.

And now the good news (you knew I wouldn’t let you down): I am making the entire book available again. The poems will be uploaded at the rate of one per day, starting today. So you can have the words with lunch.

I do have the writer’s permission. But even if I didn’t, I wonder if she would object, seeing as how piracy has been such a valuable teacher to us. Charlene is a teacher as well, but not one of those stuffy by-the-rules ones. She can be a bit of a joker, but a serious joker nonetheless.

There is no such dish as mangosteen crumble, but the title poem asks us to imagine such a thing. It sounds like it could work: the tart sourness of the fruit, the harder crumbly pastry, all topped off with the cool sweetness of cream.

It’s also a metaphor for cross-cultural connections, but it’s the very best kind of metaphor, because you can eat it! Even if you become fat, your chunkiness itself becomes a metaphor for consumerist excess, so we’re fine even with that.

Charlene also appears to be a fan of rojak: words that are not considered English are used without italics. The point is that nothing should ever seem foreign to us, if only we open our hearts.

The rojak point has often been made of Malaysia, of course. But unlike, say, California (which has a bigger ethnic variety) our smorgasbord of difference is presented as a selling point when we feel like it but also used to justify oppression in other times. What gives?

This book is divided into four sections. The first, “Rasam Concoctions” and third, “Teh Tarik Tempo,” are the ones that dance the most to different simultaneous drums. The Malaysian sensorium is brought to bear: smell it and see! And if you like it, you can always lick it.

This isn’t some witless tourist pamphlet. You can bite things, but things will also bite you back. Bringing together different icons –temples rubbing up against mosques – is meant as both nourishment and polemic. There are also poems that critique our other ‘culture’ of packaging everything into boxes, complete with price-tags.

The words are limber and easy, but always in search of ironies and telling details, and always questioning. Such as: when flags are raised so high, don’t they become impossible for those with “feet on the ground” to grasp it?

The second section, “Squashed Rojak Packet”, presents a dark view of family romance, and of the ties that (as a comedian once put it) both bind and gag. This section tends not to get mentioned much in the few reviews that have appeared, but it’s a fascinating counterpoint to the more playful celebrations. You can’t taste the sweet if you don’t know what bitter is.

The final section, “Sothy and Strings”, is the most ambitious. It presents two different scenarios: the Japanese Occupation and strife in Sri Lanka, but through very ground-level gazes: a Malayan child, and a Malaysian visitor who has Ceylonese roots, respectively.

Even more than the anthology Urban Odysseys (2009), this slim but memorable book is important for creating an English with the rhythms of home. Now that you can read it for yourself, it can once again hit where the heart is.

* Do start reading the book today at 

http://mangosteen-crumble.blogspot.com/

The Malay/sian dilemma

SAYA PUN MELAYU by Zaid Ibrahim (ZI Publications, 2009, 311 pages)

This is a well-timed missive. While the author’s first book In Good Faith (2007) was cobbled together from speeches and essays, Saya Pun Melayu has the more coherent feel of a sustained argument.

I hope that, instead of snoozing through speeches, delegates at a certain party assembly can while away the time in a crowded, air-conditioned hall by reading this instead. It will prove much less soporific.

It’s not for nothing that the first other local book he cites is Dr. Mahathir’s The Malay Dilemma. Both of them were by opinionated politicians who had previously made names for themselves in non-political fields, and written right after they were expelled from UMNO!

But there are differences, too. The Malay Dilemma was first written in English for a British publisher, while this is in the ancestral language of the people it most urgently addresses. This has nothing to do with the ethno-nationalist credentials of either man, just differing realities of the publishing industry.

A more important difference is that while the older book had an “Us vs. Them” worldview, this seeks to articulate a Malay nationalism that is simultaneously a Malaysian nationalism.

If Saya Pun Melayu is also a wake-up call, it’s less for any particular hegemonic party to reform itself, but for the Malaysian polity as a whole to reorient ourselves to a new scenario where justice and accountability must become more important than ethno-centric conduct.

Zaid Ibrahim starts by reminding us that he is our shortest-serving Cabinet Minister ever. (Compilers of The Malaysia Book of Records, take note!) Roped in by the Badawi administration as de facto Law Minister last year, he resigned after only 6 months at the government’s decision to use the ISA against perceived political opponents.

He defends his decision, but wants to do much more. The very title Saya Pun Melayu immediately intrigues. The ‘pun’ (not in the ‘no pun intended’ sense) seeks to break ethnic identification with any particular party. For the Malay race to be vibrant, it should not be “united” if unity means a corrupt, unthinking consensus. Any race necessarily breaks up into different ideologies and inclinations; otherwise, everyone might as well be produced by factory assembly-line.

Two words that keep recurring in this book are bangga and malu. Both simple words, but with deep connotations, and certainly not as emotive or brow-beating as megah and perkasa for the former, or hina for the latter.

He is justly proud (bangga) that he is a self-made man who rose from a low-income background (walking 6 km to school in Kelantan, and even doing his own study in London because, possibly, a Mara scholarship contract made the mistake of not including his tuition fees!) to become a successful lawyer. It would be an insult to assume that all successful Malays had to depend mainly on race quotas to get ahead.

Malu in this book is more interesting. Aren’t Malays embarrassed (malu) to surrender their autonomy, integrity and self-respect to an establishment that commits all kinds of hijinks and discrimination in their name? Shouldn’t Malays also be embarrassed to keep ‘threatening’ non-Malays even though it’s the latter group that pays the taxes to make the government bureaucracy such a generous employer?

It’s not all doom and gloom. He cites examples from past politicians, and artists like P. Ramlee, who didn’t resort to reactionary defensiveness. Those men and women had cosmopolitan ease and principled stances, as opposed to the desperate politicos who play the race card to get ahead.

By being in Malay, this is an important book to indigenise democratic dissent. Words like liberal and (gasp!) secular are approvingly invoked, and their benefits are shown through anecdotes near and far. Asking a Malay-Muslim to imagine what would happen to one of their kind in, say, China if that country preached ‘ethnic Chinese supremacy’ is one such example.

The middle section is a memoir, but there are some tantalising gaps. Was he really so naïve to be shocked, at age 42, that he could not win even a low-level UMNO contest without having a ‘godfather’ from HQ? Why did he join the party in the first place, when his father was an avid PAS supporter? And why don’t we get insider gossip on the workings of UEM, the company that made his corporate name when he was entrusted to represent it?

The last one might be asking too much. Zaid’s vision of a mature society where right trumps might, and where we all have a place in the sun, should be enough to call this The Malay Dilemma Revisited if that title wasn’t already taken by Bakri Musa. There is also impish humour: he affirms the Federal Constitution as the nation’s highest law, regardless of whether we do yoga or not.

(Malay Mail, 25 March)

Did I just buy the only Malaysian copy of this book?

Among the great hikayats, serats and sukuns that have emanated from the Indonesian-Malaysian archipelago, the Javanese courtly epic the Serat Centhini has to stand heads and shoulders above the rest ...

I first heard the Serat Centhini discussed when I lived in Jakarta 5 years ago; and since I didn't just nongkrong with pervs (although I did dugem with a few of them) it was not just for the Kama Sutra elements of the text, either. I never got the chance to read it.


So it's with some joy that I found out, via the ever-vigilant Farish (read his review here), that a comprehensive English rendition is available. I called up a few Malaysian bookshops. Kinokuniya didn't have it; neither did the entire Popular chain. There was only one copy in one MPH store (Subang Parade), and that is now mine.

"Malaysian Gods" at UiTM Shah Alam this Wed.

MALAYSIAN GODS
Malaysia / 2009 / 70 Minutes / in Tamil with English subtitles

Wednesday / 25 March 2009 / 8.10pm
Studio Pancha Delima, Academic Building, UiTM Kampus Puncak Perdana

*The director Amir Muhammad will be in attendance for Q&A
FREE Admission / ALL are welcome

Organised by FACT FILM SCREENING CLUB
FACULTY OF ARTISTIC & CREATIVE TECHNOLOGY (FACT)
UNIVERSITI TEKNOLOGI MARA

Have you seen this in any Malaysian bookshop recently?

If you have, do let me know!

Now on DVD: 'Bukak Api' + 'Malaikat Di Jendela'

Bukak Api (2000) is a groundbreaking movie which started life as an educational video for the transsexual prostitutes of Chow Kit. But it evolved into something richer: an entertaining, deliberately melodramatic and highly impassioned defense of difference. It was never officially acknowledged as a 'film', but its 80 minutes glitter with chutzpah and compassion: one of the real achievements in modern Malaysian cinema. It's certainly the ultimate portrait of nocturnal KL.

Although the director Osman Ali was later given bigger much budgets for Puaka Tebing Biru and Anak Halal, those never quite captured the initial spirit he displayed here.

Now it is finally on DVD and can be ordered here! It includes Osman's very pretty 30-minute short Malaikat Di Jendela.

Brave new world

MARCH 8: THE DAY MALAYSIA WOKE UP by Kee Thuan Chye (Marshall Cavendish, 2008, 324 pages)

This book has been around for many a moon but I deliberately waited until the first anniversary of the titular date to begin reading it. I wanted to see how much of it would ‘hold up’, and on this count alone the book does succeed.

Kee Thuan Chye’s Introduction and opening chapter breathlessly recount his spine-tingling excitement at the result of our last General Elections. The great change that has taken place can be found in his words right there: just five years ago, for example, would a highly-placed editor in a nation-building paper like The Star have been brave enough to say that he’s always supported and voted for the Opposition? He’d more likely have been told to get a job at a non-existent paper like The Moon instead.

This, more than any statistic or data analysis, confirms the optimistic premise of this book: Malaysians have finally shown that we are capable of living without fear (Well, on a pedantic note: He’s no longer an Opposition supporter, at least not at the State levels of Penang ,where he’s from, and Selangor, where he lives.)

Kee’s is the only name on the front cover, but it’s more accurate for him to get an editor credit than an authorial one. There are many essays here by other public intellectuals who seek to answer the “why?” and venture thoughts on the “what next?” There are also interviews with politicians and members of media and civil society, and most of them are indeed sober and considered.

The few that are not so sober and considered provide, not surprisingly, the most memorable sections. To pick just three:

I loved Ann Lee’s Sabahan perspective; she moved effortlessly from childhood memories of collecting yo-yos to explaining why the citizens of her home state have every right to be peeved at how much they have been used and abused by the mainstream political machine.

I was also thoroughly charmed by Anil Netto’s debut venture (as far as I know) into printed fiction. He posits a utopian future for Penang, which is now so environmentally sound and effortlessly egalitarian that it reads like the optimistic version of Iain Buchanan’s Fatimah’s Kampung.

Among the interviews, the most attention-grabbing was Raja Petra Kamarudin’s. It’s in his trademark provocateur style, although he’s one of the few who says that if the Malay masses knew that they would get this result, they would have voted differently. It’s just a short remark but it helps to temper the sadly unfounded theory that Malaysians have finally gotten rid of racial politics. Raja Petra chooses to be coy only on the subject that forms the title of his interview: “How big are your balls?” And for this we can only be grateful; although I am in favour of a Freedom of Information Act, there is such a thing as knowing too much.

We are a year older, and Malaysians are getting sick of politicians. (That’s why I’m not mentioning any of their names here.) The Government has not learned to be fully responsive to the people, and some in the Opposition seem addicted to gimmicks, such as the alarming plan to take over the nation via defections.

In hindsight, this book would have benefitted from a chapter on the role of an unelected institution like the monarchy, to show that even non-politicians can have crucial political roles – that is, if we allow them. It should also have included some of the BN titans who suffered at the polls – were they not approached? It would have been fun to see their views challenged, or for them to challenge the editor’s views.

For views on how to improve the political situation, just pop into one of our warung kopi or engage the services of a garrulous taxi-driver. I wish there were a few chapters of that sort. We already hear a lot from the urban liberal intelligentsia. (But you know we love you!) For starters: having elections very regularly, every four years or so, would surely get rid of some unproductive suspense, and avoid the dates always favouring the incumbent … although they did seem to miscalculate this time.

I would like the incumbent coalition to some day become a good opposition front. The keyword here is ‘good.’ It would be good for the Malaysian psyche to have different people taking turns to represent us, so that we can further learn to separate party from government. Most countries in the world can do this without undue fuss, so what makes us so special?

Such a result would also be good for the present-day incumbents. Not holding Federal power will help the parties get rid of unwanted baggage in the form of hangers-on who are just in it for the cash and glory. This will help to strengthen and streamline the parties to really focus on delivering the goods.

Is this as much a dream as Anil Netto’s non-polluting tram cars of the future Penang? I think not. Just because we have woken up, this doesn’t mean we should ever stop dreaming. Remember: the ‘balls’ are firmly in our court.

(Malay Mail, 18 March)