Interlok revisited

I was going to write about something else, but two things happened that made me change my mind. First, was this gentleman I met who asked me what I did for a living? Then when he heard that I was a publisher, he immediately asked my opinion on the Interlok controversy. I started cautiously by saying that I had read the book, both the Malay and English versions, but before I could continue he asked:

“You mean you have read the book?”

I stopped in my tracks. It was a bizarre question and a bizarre moment. Why was he asking for my opinion if he thought I hadn’t read the book? If he wanted a hysterical uninformed opinion, there was plenty going around. Perhaps, he thought I would abandon scholarship for tribal loyalty and salute the flag he was waving, without a second thought. Perhaps, he was surprised that I could read Malay and, worse still, admit it. Perhaps, he was shocked that, in these days of self-righteous chest-thumping, I dared to look at an issue from another angle.

Second, was this email from one person (whom I shall leave him unnamed): DOES A LOYAL MALAYSIAN INDIAN DESERVE THIS KIND OF INSULT IN A COUNTRY HE CALLS MOTHERLAND ?????????? (Yes, all in capitals, 18 point fonts and in red colour, to boot).

My opinion of the book in question is that, though wobbly in (many) parts and a little naïve, it is certainly one of the better Malaysian books I have read. It is, basically, a story of the human spirit. Abdullah Hussain’s empathy with his characters (whether it is Seman, Cing Huat or Maniam) is quite admirable. Read the following, for example:

Kadang-kadang dia masih lapar. Bau roti yang dibakar dan disapu serikaya menimbulkan rangsangan dalam kepalanya untuk makan, bau makanan yang di masak oleh penjual nasi di sudut kedai itu menimbulkan nafsu untuk makan dan kadang kadang dia melihat daging babi yang tergantung dengan lemaknya yang berminyak-minyak itu, menggoda dia untuk makan. (Interlok, page 156)

(Sometimes he (Cing Huat) remained hungry. The smell of bread being toasted and spread with serikaya would stimulate his brain to eat, the smell of rice being cooked by the food seller next door triggered his appetite and sometimes when he saw the  (roast) pork hanging with its fatty oil dripping, it would entice him.)

A Malay writer talking about the smell or lard from roast pork? No, Abdullah Hussain is not afraid to go where no one else dares, if it serves his art. I hugely admire his research, his craft and his courage. And he is, certainly, no racist.

As for the offending “p” word it appears twice in the book:

Satu perkara besar yang membuat mereka senang bergaul ialah mereka itu tergolong dalam satu kasta Paria. Mereka tidak takut mengotori sesiapa kalau bersentuhan dan mereka bebas lepas bergaul. (Interlok, page 251)

(One thing that made it easy for them to mix around was the fact that they were all from the same Pariah caste. They had no fear of polluting anyone they touched and were free to mingle.)

One feels for Maniam. Yes, this is how he would have felt, coming from a background of centuries of oppression and suppression. Abdullah Hussain got it right. (Mulk Raj Anand would have applauded, too.) Taking the “p” word out would be doing injustice to the Maniams of the world. It would have been precisely because of his caste that he would have been considered untouchable and unclean, and he would have had every reason to be nervous.

Di sini, Maniam dapati perbezaan perkerjaan menurut kasta, seperti yang masih berlaku di negerinya, tidak ada.

Pertama kali inilah yang ditanya oleh Maniam kapada Muthu, seorang kawan dari desanya yang sudah lama tinggal di Pulau Pinang. Muthu seorang dari kasta Paria, seperti Maniam juga, dia berkerja sebagai kerani di sebuah gudang orang putih dekat perlabuhan. (Interlok, page 257)

(Over here, Maniam noticed that working according to one’s caste was not in practice.
That was the first thing that Maniam asked Muthu, a friend from the same village who had lived in Penang for a long time. Muthu was from the Pariah caste, just like Maniam, and he was working as a clerk at the godowns belonging to the white people near the port.)

There is nothing negative about this section either. It is a statement of fact. To a person like Maniam, this would have been a big deal indeed. He could do any work he wanted, even become a clerk like his friend Muthu, his Malaysian Dream, his ticket out of hell.  According to an article in the Malay Mail on Monday 24th August, 2009, 65% of MIC members belong to this caste although they now refer to themselves as Namavars – our people. Again, Abdullah Hussain’s research cannot be faulted.

Interlok is the story of three people and their trials. Seman is devastated when he learns from his father on his deathbed that the land they have been tilling all these years does not belong to them but a Chinese towkay, Cina Panjang. Chin Huat leaves his mother to come to Malaya with his father to escape an impending famine in China. Maniam travels to Malaya, the land he keeps hearing about, leaving his wife behind to escape crippling poverty. And in the end, they all get together and live happily ever after (which, in hind-sight, is the actual fairy tale).

The first part about Seman is, probably, the best written. Cing Huat’s section is good, too, though Abdullah Hussain does not say how or why this personable Chinese lad transforms himself into the predator businessman, Cina Panjang. The Maniam section is the weakest part and is riddled with minor and major errors. It is as if the author, tired of research, resorted to watching a few Tamil movies for the right cliches -- complete with the long suffering hero, the unfaithful wife, the totally evil villain (Suppiah), the mandatory rape scene followed by the suicide of the victim, and the long lost son who discovers that the prisoner in his police lockup is really his father. Corny to the max.

Then, the final scene is all Malaysian TV during elections: sugared to the hilt to induce terminal diabetes in the entire population of a small country.

But, one thing remains unclear, though. By some accounts, the version to be used in school is an abridged one (and not the 503-page original). If that is the case then all my comments above could be completely off the mark, because I have no idea what has been taken out and what remains. Knowing the track record of our gomen pen-pushers over decades past, I am aware that they are capable of being quite jahat about it.

Anyway, the cabinet has appointed a committee to look into the matter. This, normally, means that nothing will happen. Some new crisis will emerge and we all forget about Interlok. We are, after all, Malaysians.

The one good thing to come out of this crisis is that many people are reading the book, and Interlok is sold out in most bookshops. Good on you, Abdullah Hussain.

Lies that bind

First of all: Happy New Year. Joe Klein wrote in the Time magazine recently about 2010 being the year of the leaks: from the massive leaks in the Gulf of Mexico to the Wikileaks. It was a leaky year, all right, though most people I have spoken to wonder what the big deal was. Was the BP disaster totally unexpected given the way ‘big oil’ (or any other major corporation obsessed with the bottomline) go about their business? Was anyone surprised that diplomats often have to lie through their teeth to clean up the mess left behind by their political masters?

Many are getting their knickers in a knot, “How could they?” Welcome to the real world, darlings. In the internet, nothing is sacred and nothing is secret. Anything you say can and will be used against you. Cry what you want for Assange to be tried and jailed, but he is only the messenger. This is the 21st century, you hide stuff and people will find it. Maybe, diplomacy has to grow up? As Robert Zimmerman says:

You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal

We have plenty of experience with that in this country: hiding stuff. It is called censorship. We hide books on religion and politics to protect our people from deviant teaching, not that people can’t get whatever they want off the internet, or a hundred other sources. Brilliant is the way we ban sex from adults (but not babies -- wonderful contradiction that), ostensibly to protect our young who still believe that pregnancy is caused by sneezing. If you are gay, please keep it a secret: we will send an entire ministry after you and, yes, the minister has nothing better to do. (It would be interesting to find out how many people think the Official Secrets Act is designed to protect nations, and not to cover-up the misdemeanours of the rich and powerful.)

So, we come back to the point of lying. The curious thing about lying is that we can’t live without it. We lie everyday, almost every time we open our mouths, actually. Think about it. Call them white lies, green lies, blue lies, whatever; but they remain lies. Like the false laugh when we speak on the phone; or the way we’d claim, “She wouldn’t let me put down the phone,” after a three hour conversation. Remember the time you drove 25 miles into the boondocks to get a packet of cheese biscuits for your sister’s cat in Ipoh, swearing all the time, and then saying to her afterwards that it was no problem (when what you really wanted to do was kill her)? Is lying a human condition, then? 

I have customers who will come into Silverfish and declare very loudly (for everyone to hear) that they didn’t read fiction. I would feel like saying how sorry I felt for them, but I wouldn’t. Silence is another form of lying. But, coming back to the point, is fiction a lie? If it is the truth, why disguise it as a lie?

I will tell you a story. This was in the early seventies, just after I graduated. I was on a ‘guru’ trip like many others; one of those tantric yoga groups. I didn’t feel out of place because everyone was friendly and everything. Then, they decided on a retreat to Fraser’s Hill to which I went along as a driver. At this retreat was a young man from Thailand, very personable, but with only a stuttering command of English. He had just returned from India after meeting ‘Baba’. He was asked for an account, and this is how it, more or less, went:

How was it? (Excited.)

It was okay.

How was the Baba? (Still excited.)

He was okay. He was nice.

That’s it? Did he not materialise a flower for you? A watch? A radio? (Disappointed.)

No. (Laughs.) But Baba likes to joke.

What did he say?

He asked about my folks. I told him that my mother was okay, that she has recovered from her illness ...

Was your mother ill?

Oh, that was two years ago. She had a minor stroke, but she has recovered almost completely ...

Were you a devotee at the time?

Yes, yes. I have been a devotee for five years ...

Hah! A miracle! Don’t you see? Baba cured your mother. (Loud noises of approval, group excitement.)

I watched the performance, stunned. I was speechless. Baba had cured someone’s mom of cancer.

I stopped going to the centre after that.

Is cute the new cool?

The conversation started like this. An old friend, a thespian (who shall not be named, considering the propensity for name calling and flaming amongst some segments of our society), was in the shop the other day, and we started bellyaching, as it seems the norm these days, about the ‘Malaysian condition’. He mentioned a friend, also a Malaysian (but shall remain nameless), just back from Australia, who asked him to tell her just one thing Malaysians are good at. Though cornered into a position of indignant ire, all he could do was bluster, but he refused to concede defeat. So, the question remains: what is the one thing Malaysians are good at?

When one is confronted with a question like this, one normally assumes he means: “Tell me one thing Malaysians are ‘world class’ at.” At which juncture, one would be tempted to be flippant and say, “Video piracy, fake ‘Lolek’ watches, football fixing, money laundering, and ‘How about that guy who was arrested in America recently with 400,000 credit card details in his laptop?’”

Seriously.

His was a familiar lament: “The theatre is gone. Nobody wants to work hard. Maybe there is no talent anymore.” That isn’t logical, of course. How can talent simply disappear? Is there such a thing as an entire talentless generation? I, certainly, cannot buy that; I work with so a many young people, though I do remember a time when Malaysia had world class sportsmen, world class universities, world class research institutions, and doctors and engineers and lawyers and ... Maybe we still have them, maybe we are only having one of those ‘good old days’ nostalgia trips, to feed our illusion, our maya.

The discussion was going nowhere, so I decided to divert it. “But, what I really cannot understand is this epidemic of cuteness that’s going around. You should read some of the stuff I get. They can’t write, but they want to be cute.”

“So, that’s it then. If you have no talent, be cute,” he said.

We were both being unfair, of course. I do get good manuscripts sometimes, it’s just that the bad ones outnumber them, and can be seriously bad and painful. “It is about the content, darling, not how cute you are,” one is tempted to say, but never does. One only suffers in silence. (I have a hypothesis about this, from my experience: the more cocky and pushy the writer, the less talented he or she is. The quiet shy ones, the painfully self-effacing ones, often surprise.)

Still, I find this cuteness thing a little bizarre. I was at a wedding dinner at a hotel in Subang Jaya recently. You know how they used to have this cheesy “Eye of the Tiger” routine, with burning torches and all, to introduce the first dish? Anyway, the lights went out, the music (not the one mentioned above) started. I waited for the torches to appear with our dinner. But, nothing. The music went on and on, still nothing  happened as far as I could see. Then I noticed that most eyes were on the stage behind me. I turned around, and almost burst out laughing. On stage, two painted cardboard swans were ‘dancing’ slowly towards one another, finally ‘kissing’, sending out a shower of red ‘hearts’. It was so corny, but I am sure many of the rest thought it was cute.

I must be getting old. Wherever I go these days, I seem to be surrounded by cuteness. Hideous fibre-glass pitcher plants, steel hibiscus lampposts, plastic Christmas trees with cotton wool snow … Ever been to a PTA concert where everyone goes, “Oh they are so cute,” and you are thinking, ‘But they are so talentless’? They are, of course, using the word in its original meaning: cuddly, harmless and sexless -- like babies, puppies and kittens. Referring to grandpas, grandmas, uncles, aunties and other grownups as cute probably suggests the same thing -- sexless and harmless with a certain weirdness or eccentricity.  I am not used to it but, I guess, it’s the fashion. (Remember when we used to say ‘groovy’ for everything -- ughhh!) But when someone says a guy is ‘so cute’ or refers to a girl as a ‘cute chick’, I feel like, “It is so weird, man!”

Then, there is this Facebook thing, with 500 million people out there trying to ‘out-cute’ one another. Now, that is scary, enough cuteness there to start a pandemic of diabetes, or nausea, or both.

Maybe, thinking of the ‘groovy’ old days is not so bad. It is only nostalgia -- useless, lame, embarrassing, but harmless.

It is that time of the year (and decade) again. So, Happy Holidays. (Avoid the malls if canned holiday jingles drive you crazy.)

How I survived Frankfurt

Having seen the retail fish market that is the Kuala Lumpur International Book Fair, I have never been enamoured of them -- book fairs, I mean. They are too big, fussy and noisy for my taste, I have decided. KLAB (The Kuala Lumpur Alternative Book Fair) is my limit -- small, smiley and friendly.
“You have to go to Frankfurt,” I have been told for ten years. Why? “Because it is an experience, because it is the biggest book fair in the world.” But none of that were convincing arguments as far as I was concerned. You probably think this strange. I have been buying books for over half a century (saving tuck-shop cash when I was in school), but the very thought of hundreds of thousands of square metres of books scares the life out of me. That’s why I avoid mega stores whichever city I visit, just as I avoid warehouse sales. I find them too intimidating (and more than a little stupid). My best buys have always been from the little stores in the corner -- some curated, some not. One never knows what one will find there -- I bought a lovely hardback edition of Winnie the Pooh from a little shop with about fifty English language titles in Frankfurt this last trip.

Even so, when I received this invitation from Litprom (Society for the promotion of African, Asian and Latin American Literature), I was cautiously excited. I was prepared to be disappointed, but I was determined to give it my best shot -- whatever that meant. Although airfares and board was paid by the organisers, participants had to bear the cost of shipping their books, which can come to quite a bit when calculated in Euros (for a small publisher like us). Anyway, after I got to Frankfurt, I was told that exhibitors were not allowed to sell books except on the last two days when the fair was open to the public. Even then, a strict ‘no discount’ policy was to be followed. I ended up giving away most of my books because I didn’t want to ship them back.

The facts about the Frankfurter Buchemesse boggle the mind a bit -- started about 600 years ago, over 7,300 exhibitors in 5 humungous halls from 100 countries, some 300,000 trade visitors, 10,000 journalist and hundreds of forums and book events -- but none of that quite begins to give one an idea of the magnitude. “Try not to be overwhelmed”, “sit back and watch the book world go by”, “don’t try to take it all in on your first visit”, are some advice I was given. Still, when one goes in on the first day, it is like being hit by a tsunami. (In the 5 days I was there, I’d say I took in less than 5 percent of the fair, including Jonathan Franzen and Gunter Grass).

Silverfish Books was given a stall with the rest of those in the invitation programme, in Hall 5.0 -- each hall has several levels -- with the Arab countries, Africa and the East Europeans. The floor above us housed the Latin Americans, and next door were most of the Asian countries, including Malaysia. (The Malaysian pavilion in Hall 6.1 was curious, to say the least. Looking like a decorated piece of cheese cake, it appeared to be caught in a conundrum: what  was it promoting, tourism or books? It was so ‘gomen’, it was scary. The first two times I visited it, I quietly walked away because there appeared to be no one interested in talking to visitors. Only on my third visit did I see some friendly faces (from ITNM); I introduced a few friends of mine from Litprom to them and I believe they had a good meeting.) The biggest, Hall 8.0, was mainly occupied by exhibitors from the US, UK and India. (A person who should know said that there were more UK exhibitors in Hall 8.0 than at the London Book Fair. He also dismissed them derisively by saying that they were only interested in selling, not buying.) I visited Hall 8.0 on Friday afternoon and found it surprisingly quiet; maybe all businesses had already been successfully concluded by then.

Frankfurter Buchmesse is the place where one buys and sells rights; that is the raison d’etre of the fair. Though I have received inquiries from over ten countries, from Hungary to Holland (this will be a drawn-out affair), the most important aspect of the fair is how it opens the eyes of those of us stuck in the anglophone book world. Some of the East European and the Latin American stands were stunning (and not in the tourism promotion way), the quality and range of books were quite astounding. I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of children’s books from Morocco and Lebanon, coffee table books from Egypt, Ecuador and Rumania, and fiction from Africa and Latin America. One publisher from the Dominican Republic makes his books himself in his house -- he has 64 titles to date and sells them friends, relatives and universities. Another from Venezuela says he was broke for a whole year after a beautiful art-cum-poetry venture, though it didn’t stop him.

The best part of the fair was meeting all those people more passionate and crazier than oneself. And, there are plenty of crazies out there.

The worst part? Well, coming home to humungous North Korean style political posters on the roadside and the blank ink blotch painted on the cover of my Time magazine.