Index for NME2

As was the case with NME1, we had a lot of fun creating the Index for New Malaysian Essays 2. Just looking at all these names and titles, and how they rub up against one another, is enough to spark off all sorts of imaginative tangents. 

*

2000AD (comic book) 209

A

Abdul Hadi Awang 52, 59

Abdul Razak Hussein 185

Abu Huraira 20, 24

Abul A’la Maududi 59

Abu Sa’id al-Khudri 26

Adam (first man) 23, 270

Adorno, Theodore 137

Adventures of Superman, The (TV series) 206

Ahmad ibn Hanbal 22

Aku Cinta Padamu (song) 118

Alice (hot babe) 173, 184, 186, 188

Allah 16, 19, 20, 21, 24, 26, 27, 29, 34, 38

Amina Wadud 37, 39

Anak Pontianak (film) 215, 218, 221, 222, 225, 228, 254

An-Nasa’i 23, 26

Anwar Ibrahim 57, 59, 127

Anwar Ridhwan 9

A. Samad Ismail 11

B

Barks, Carl 205

Baudelaire, Charles 9

BBC (TV channel) 275

Berita Harian (newspaper) 251

Bible, The (book) 24, 139

Bin Jidan 75

Bohsia: Jangan Pilih Jalan Hitam (film) 123

Bourgeois, Louise 151

Bukhari 21,22,23,24

Burchill, Julie 10

Bürger, Gottfried August 255

Burgess, Anthony 123

Bush, George W. 250

C

Cameron, Mike 209

Carroll, Lewis 9

Che Det (blog) 119

Chin Peng 124

Chow Kon Yeow 158

Cindai (song) 118

Cool Hand Luke (film) 200

Corbusier, Le 49

D

Dang Anum 120

Dendam Pontianak (film) 218, 254

Derrida, Jacques 202

Dewa (not the band) 75, 77

Dewi Murni (film) 120

Diana Naim 118

Discovery Science (TV Channel) 275

Disneyland 134, 135, 150, 157, 158

Dracula (book) 255, 257

E

Eastern Time (newspaper) 256

Economist, The (magazine) 278

F

Facebook (website) 38, 196

Farish A. Noor 136

Few Good Men, A (film) 199

Fountain of Youth, The (TV series) 205

Full Metal Jacket (film) 180

G

Gibran, Khalil 78

Gibson, Mel 205

God 8, 18, 23, 34, 120, 127, 128, 129, 148, 242, 254

Godfather, The (film) 204

Gone with the Wind (film) 211

Google (website) 128, 196, 252

Grudge, The (film) 264

H

Hafiz (Mat Rempit) 164, 166, 171

Hamid Bond 230, 232

Hang Jebat 125, 135

Hang Jebat (film) 125

Hang Nadim 122

Hang Tuah 135

Hansen, GA 138, 142

Hawa (first woman) 270

Hemingway, Ernest 7

Heston, Charlton 205

Horn, Roni 151

Hussein Haniff 125

I

Independent, The (newspaper) 129

Interview with a Vampire (book) 255

Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The (film) 205

Ismail Talib 238, 239

J

Jalaluddin Hassan 240

Jesus Christ 34, 36

Jimmy 75, 77

Jins Shamsuddin 215, 221

Jolie, Angelina 130

Jonas Brothers 193

Joshua-Raghavar, A 150

K

Kang Kang (bully victim) 179, 180, 187

Kassim Ahmad 125

Khalid Abu Bakar 26

Khir Toyo 269

Khoo Gaik Cheng 237

Khoo Kay Kim 136

Kimberly (lord) 142

Kit, Sivin 34, 38

Konsep Perbandaran Islam: Suatu Gagasan Alternatif (book) 51

Ku Milikmu (song) 118

L

Lat 195

Layar Lara (film) 242

Lenore (book) 255

Little House on the Prairie (TV show) 31

Lloyd Wright, Frank 49, 50

Lots of Lat (book) 195

M

Mahathir Mohamad, Dr. 52, 56, 57, 119

Malayan Trilogy, The (book) 123

Malay Magic (book) 215, 254

Malay Mail (newspaper) 131, 282

Malaysian Book of the Undead, The (book) 10

Malik ibn Anas 21

Maltese Falcon, The (film) 207

Mandela, Nelson 155

Manohara Odelia Pinot 119

Maria Menado 232, 233, 254

Marx, Groucho 79

Mastika (magazine) 255

Matinya Seorang Pahlawan (play) 125

Mawi 118, 123

McDonald, Ronald (imperialist clown) 207

Mohamad Tajuddin Mohamad Rasdi 71

Mohd Asri Zainul Abidin 40

Muhammad (prophet) 20, 21, 25, 28

Muhammad Haji Salleh 196, 198, 199, 200

Munslow, Alan 137

Musa Hassan 25

Muslim 21, 22, 26

Mussolini, Benito 8

MySpace (website) 196

N

Najib Razak 10

National Geographic (TV channel) 255

Negaraku (song) 170

Nelson, Horatio 184

Network (film) 195

New Straits Times (NST) (newspaper) 134, 157, 281

New York Times, The (newspaper) 119

New York World (newspaper) 205

Nilam (film) 120

NTV7 (TV channel) 275

Nurul Izzah Anwar 126

O

Ong, Aihwa 236

Onn Jaafar 123

On the Waterfront (film) 211

P

Pak Lah (Abdullah Ahmad Badawi) 185

Pan Jit Huan 142

Pontianak (lost1957 film) 218

Pontianak (lame 1975 film) 228

Pontianak Gua Musang (film) 218, 223, 224, 225, 226, 254

Pontianak Harum Sundal Malam (film) 216, 218, 234, 235, 236, 238, 242, 255, 261, 268

Pontianak Harum Sundal Malam II (film) 218, 242

Pontianak Kembali (film) 218, 254

Pontianak Menjerit (film) 218, 240, 241

P. Ramlee 195

Presley, Elvis 195

Prophet, The (book) 78

Pulitzer, Joseph 205

Pusaka Pontianak (film) 218, 226, 240, 254

Puteri Gunung Ledang (film) 121

Q

Quran, Al (book) 21, 24, 28, 34, 41, 129, 233, 264

R

Raja Bersiong (film) 122, 128

Rajagopalan. Dr. K 150

Raja Petra Kamarudin 96

Ramdan (dog) 76, 77

Reeves, George 206

Rice, Anne 255

Ricoeur, Paul 202

Ring, The (film) 253, 264, 279

Rosdan Abdul Manan 51

Rowing Down Two Rivers (book) 198, 200

RTM 16, 254

Rustam A. Sani 11

S

Safwan bin Salim 24

Samy Vellu, S. 126

Santayana, George 137

Saw, Patrick 9

Schwarzenegger, Arnold 193

Sejarah Malaysia (book) 278

Selubung (film) 242

Seyyed Hossein Nasr 28

Shabery Cheek 271

Shahrum Yub 151

Sheikh Ali Gomaa 39

Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, Dr. 267

Shuhaimi Baba 255, 261

Shuster, Joe 206

Siegel, Jerry 206

Siti Nurhaliza 118, 119

Skeat, William Walter 215, 254

Spong, John Shelby 38, 40

Star Spangled Banner, The (song) 205

Star, The (newspaper) 163, 164, 251, 281, 283

Star Wars (film) 203

Steinbeck, John 162

Stoker, Bram 255

Suharto 126

Sumpah Pontianak (film) 218, 219, 221, 222, 254

Sun, The (newspaper) 7, 282

Susuk (film) 118

Sweet Valley High (books) 247

Syarif Abdurrahman Al-Qadri 256

Syed Hussein Alatas 203, 204

T

Tan Hoon Cheng 96

Taxi Driver (film) 196

Tengku Adnan Tengku Mansor 252

Terminator 2: Judgement Day (film) 210

Tukar Tiub (blog) 76

Tunku Abdul Rahman 52, 54, 122

Tunku Halim 216

Twitter (website) 8

U

Umar al-Khattab 59

Uthayakumar, P. 111

V

V for Vendetta (film) 30

Viz (comic book) 208

W

Walrus and the Carpenter, The (poem) 9

Wazir Jahan Karim 236

Welles, Orson 205

White Heat (film) 211

Wikipedia (website) 248, 278

Wilkinson, RJ 121

Wizard of Oz, The (film) 193

Wong Chin Huat 130

Y

Yap, Brian 7

Yeoh, Tricia 32

Youtube (website) 76, 274

Z

Zahid Hamidi 25

Zaitun (Toni) Kasim 11, 40

Inspector Singh is in the house

Regular readers of this blog (yes, both of you) might remember my review of Shamini Flint's crime novel Criminal Minds back in November. Although I didn't like the title and packaging, the murder mystery itself was very entertaining: it had wit, suspense and some colourful Malaysian characters. I ended by saying:

The UK publisher, bless them, has re-titled this book Inspector Singh Investigates – A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder, and it will be re-released next year. I look forward to reading it again, with the inevitably nicer cover.

Well, I was telling you no lie. The UK edition of the book is already out (check out this short review from The Guardian), and it has reached our shores:


Criminal Minds was published under her own company (registered in Singapore, where she lives) and now that a bigger international publisher has the rights, she can no longer sell the first version. So despite my mild knetch about its cover, I am happy that I not only own but wrote about a book that is now destined to be a collector's edition.

There will be promo activities in KL, I gather. You can join her Facebook fan-page to find out more. I wish the Inspector Singh series, as well as her various other books, all the best!

NME1 eligible for popular award

The Star-Popular Readers Choice Awards is back! This is a bit like the Anugerah Bintang Popular that Siti Nurhaliza keeps winning, but it's for books, ahem!

I am mildly gobsmacked to see that New Malaysian Essays 1 was one of the ten best-selling books (in the category of local English non-fiction) for last year. This is because it sold only 2,000 copies lah.

The full list of eligible titles is here.

The final 3 winners will be decided through ballots that are available in all 62 of the Popular book outlets from now till 15 July.

Malaysian Politicians Say the Darndest Things (Vol 1) was eligible the year before and got 3rd place. But as they say through gritted teeth in La-La Land, it's a pleasure to even be nominated, really it is.

GADOH made me understand something I've wondered about for over two decades

At the film screening last night, quite a few of the cast and crew explained that they they got out from the racist mindset that they were raised and schooled in when they got involved in theatre.

Of course, you can say that this is luvvie propaganda.

But then I suddenly remembered how the Education Ministry (then headed by Anwar Ibrahim, who was also a big cheese in UMNO) ceased drama competitions in national schools in the 1980s. We all though it was due to some sanctimonious squeamishness (after, theatre sometimes involves *gasp* both boys and girls on stage, and some of them might not be wearing the purdah). But the reality might be something less silly and more sinister: The Ministry (as the representative of UMNO) didn't want kids to start understanding each other. Because once they did, there was a chance that they would stop being suspicious and fearful. Hence destroying the raison d'être for all racialist parties, no?

Two decades on, I am slapping me forehead, I am.

Do catch GADOH if there's a screening near you:

Who wouldn't want to kill him?

SIX SUSPECTS by Vikas Swarup (Black Swan, 2008, 575 pages)

You can’t read Malaysian books all the time, of course; you will go bonkers! Although our publishing output is more varied than our news – microwaving the Cold War yet again? are we still wondering if theocrats can be liberal? – it’s good to take the occasional break.

Let us go to India! Just as The Book of Batik concerns us even though it was entirely about Indonesia, we also owe great debts to India. Our national language and royal customs, to pick just two obvious examples, would be very rudimentary indeed without motifs from the Motherland.

Luckily for us, Six Suspects is an absolute delight. The only Malaysian novel I know of that comes close to its madcap invention and satirical outrage is Brian Gomez’s Devil’s Place. It’s much longer and more sprawling than Vikas Swarup’s famous debut Q & A (filmed as Slumdog Millionaire, which I still haven’t seen) but it’s yet another diverting Technicolor romp through a country whose colour and contradictions make our own national dramas seem terribly pallid in comparison.

Q & A had as its hero an orphan whose origins (unlike in other novels about orphans) we never discover. He also chooses a name that is part Muslim, part Hindu and part Christian, so he can literally be anything he wants. It was tightly coiled story whose humour initially seems too cutesy, but which gripped and charmed way before its fairy-tale ending.

Six Suspects is a murder mystery but instead of following a detective around, we hang around with the five men and one woman of the title. The corpse is Vicky Rai, a young man who’s so corrupt and despicable that the question isn’t “Who killed him?” but “Who wouldn’t want to kill him?”

The cast of characters, with their various tangled motives, is delightfully improbable but we willingly surrender because Swarup knows how to keep us keen. There’s a boozy industrialist who seems to get possessed by the spirit of Gandhi; a self-absorbed but erudite Bollywood actress; a tribal man from one of the earliest civilizations on earth; a slow-witted American who was conned into coming to India; Rai’s father, the Home Minister who’s already bumped off many others; and (the character most similar to Q & A’s Ram Mohammad Thomas) a petty thief who discovers a suitcase with literally more money than he can count.

People are either on the make, on an impossible quest or hiding something, sometimes all at the same time. The template for the Western comic crime caper was perfected by Elmore Leonard, but the master’s laconic style is here wedded to a deliberately overburdened and over-determined plot that teases and twist and has not one, but three false endings.

Swarup, a career diplomat who writes in English, must be very aware of the perceptions that outsiders have of India. He deliberately crams in as many of these recognisable elements as possible – political assassins, eunuchs, religious terrorists, caste discrimination, holy pilgrimages, bomb blasts, call-centre operators, mystics, and even Bhopal victims. What saves us from a case of the dreaded ‘Delhi belly’ is his humane vision, confident mimicry and unflagging humour. The solution to the murder is more than just clever, it’s cathartic in a way the genre rarely sees.

We in Malaysia might have a narrower palette to work with, but aside from Devil’s Place I am confident we will come up with our own entertainments. All it takes is for a talented writer to peruse the news everyday … and get very, very annoyed.

(Malay Mail, 10 June)

The cover for NME2

Just as was the case with NME1, the cover of New Malaysian Essays 2 features a work by a living Malaysian artist. (click to enlarge!)


The book will launch early next month, Insya-Allah, and it will be the thickest and most expensive Matahari Books title so far, but a free copy goes to the first person who can identify the artist*, name of artwork and year!

Just post your answers here (with your name) and we will get it all sorted.

* The artist is not allowed to take part.

The long march home

ALIAS CHIN PENG: MY SIDE OF HISTORY as told to Ian Ward and Norma Miraflor (Media Masters, 2003, 527 pages)

An early chapter begins with a sentence as good as any Dickens opening: “Several months after my 25th birthday, I discovered that I was, in fact, only 23 years old.” If the events of the past had been very different, might Chin Peng (the nom de guerre of Ong Boon Hua, now 85) have become one of our very best writers?

Life was different then. Births weren’t registered efficiently; people made difficult life choices; some of those choices vex us until today. That is why, despite not having made any public statements lately, Chin Peng has become the second-most discussed octogenarian in the country. That’s not surprising because, for over four decades, he led the country’s very first political party.

The Communist Party of Malaya was also the first multi-racial party, although you can see the snag very early on when Chapter 2 is titled “A Chinese boyhood in colonial Malaya.” That well-known colonial strategy of stark racial demarcation also ensured that the CPM never really succeeded in expanding its reach, and this proved one of the factors that led to its marginalisation.

Chin Peng has lived in our popular imaginations as all sorts of things, and it’s with a sense of shock that we discover that he’s just a man. I also hadn’t counted on this book, whose very title is intelligently aware of narrative subjectivity, to strike the occasional droll note: recollecting his boyhood membership of a church choir, he says that he probably could still sing Christian songs now -- “if my life depended on it.”

I had looked forward to his account of the killing of the Sungai Siput planters, the event which triggered the Emergency. Although he says it was done without his knowledge, and that he regretted that the youngest planter was targetted (he was a new arrival in Malaya and couldn’t have known much), he ends the section with: “The deaths of the other two were acceptable.” No longer droll, just chilling.

Then again, these were people at war. The Emergency was merely a euphemism for the longest undeclared war in Commonwealth history, with tolls on both sides. Within the context of armed revolution, a white planter embodies precisely the type of capitalist exploitation that needed to be eliminated.

We have become subconsciously used to the idea of British rule as not only relatively benign but, given the circumstances of the time, somehow natural. Thus, the wounded and dead who fought on behalf of the colonial elite are protecting “the rest of us” while anyone else becomes, well, unnatural. It seems almost impossible now to imagine that if history had gone the other way (and in the decade after WWII, communism was seen as a global force not only by its supporters) we would have very different ideas of heroes and villains.

Among the rich cast of characters, the British soldier John Davis, who formed an alliance with the communists to get rid of the Japanese, emerges particularly vividly, as does the book’s villain, the triple-agent Lai Te. The unlikely friendship between Davis and Chin Peng points to how people could be ideologically opposed but still respect each other. This is something few of us appreciate nowadays.

No politician should stay in power so long, and the second half of the CPM’s active existence did indeed see the group unravelling through internal bickering and witch-hunts. But it’s the stubborn pride of its leaders that resisted a total surrender; after all, pride was one of the few things they had left.

The last chapters detail the long road to freedom...or at least out of the proverbial and literal jungle. He stops short of calling Mahathir our Mandela, but Chin Peng acknowledges the 1989 peace accord between the governments of Malaysia and Thailand as well as the CPM as a model of a dignified settlement.

It appeared that we could finally set aside our respective hurts and just move along. After all, nations with arguably more traumatic pasts, like South Africa, could reconcile their divisions, so why can’t we? Just as we shouldn’t forget history, we shouldn’t be strangled by it either.

Respect the promises we made two decades ago, and let the guy come home. There's a word for people who break their promises -- and that word is far dirtier than 'communist' ever will be.

(Malay Mail, 3 June)