Malaysian authors Preeta Samarasan (left) and Karina Robles Bahrin. (Preeta Samarasan and Karina Robles Bahrin pics)
KUALA LUMPUR: A contemporary Chinese Malaysian career woman thinks that loving a man of a different race and being his mistress may be the best the world has in store for her – until her past turns her world upside down.
Fifty years earlier, a mixed-race boy leaves Kuala Lumpur to follow his extravagant Malay mother to a hidden hill in Cameron Highlands. At six years of age, the boy is too young to understand life in the community of part-hippies, part-dropouts that inhabits the Muhibbah Center for World Peace.
These two novels, by Malaysian female authors Karina Robles Bahrin and Preeta Samarasan, published in September and October, both reflect on issues of race and identity in the country.
“The Accidental Malay,” by Robles Bahrin – published by Singapore’s Epigram Books and winner of its 2022 Book Prize, the region’s most valuable literary award – is a sharp satire on Malaysian racial stereotypes seen through the eyes of businesswoman Jasmine Leong.
She has made a fortune selling bak kwa and aspires to become her company’s new CEO, but risks losing everything when she discovers she was born a Malay Muslim and is not ethnically Chinese, as she had believed.
The killer premise is simple but potentially explosive as it delves into the theme of “ketuanan Melayu”, the upholding of rights created in the aftermath of May 13, 1969.
“[The violence of 1969] is part of our national trauma and we have to live with it, and it can really impact a person. We know that these policies exist, but the point of my book is to see how they can really affect a human being,” Robles Bahrin told Nikkei Asia.
“I was trying to humanise the impact of constitutional policies on someone.”
Robles Bahrin, who was born in KL and now runs a boutique hotel in Langkawi, wanted to write something that was personal and close to her own life story. “My mother is from the Philippines, she was raised a Catholic and then converted to Islam and married my dad, who’s a Malay Muslim.
“It turned out later that his mother was actually a Chinese woman who was adopted into a Malay family and raised as Malay,” she said. “So, biologically, I am only a quarter Malay, but nationally, I am identified as a Malay Muslim.”
“The Accidental Malay” describes with simple and vivid prose the difficult themes of national identity and the tensions inherent in a society dominated by preferential Malay rights and an Islamic majority.
The book was published in Singapore not because Robles Bahrin was afraid of a backlash, but because Malaysia’s literary landscape offers few opportunities for novels written in English. The length of her manuscript exceeded the limit for submissions to Fixi, a leading publisher of local fiction in KL.
“The point of writing a book is not to provoke, but to think about it and talk to other friends about it, talk about how you feel,” she reflected. “It doesn’t matter how, but that you explore it, and why you feel that way.”
‘Thought experiment’
Investigating the reasons why Malaysian identity is splintered is also the focus of “Tale of the Dreamer’s Son”, the second novel by Indian Malaysian writer Preeta Samarasan, who lives in rural France with her family.
Her first novel, “Evening is the Whole Day”, was published in 2008 by the United States imprint Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and is one of the few contemporary novels to describe the lives of Tamil Indian Malaysians, who “are 7% of the population, and were an even larger percentage when I was growing up”, she said.
Published by World Editions, an independent literary house launched in 2013 by Dutch publisher Eric Visser, Preeta’s new book took more than a decade to write and to find a publisher willing to support its vivid, lyrical and critical outlook on the shaping of modern Malaysia – a focus that may have been too narrow for a mainstream UK or US publisher.
Opening a few years after the 1969 riots, Samarasan’s book is set in the Muhibbah Center for World Peace, a former Scottish tea planter’s mansion turned commune where all religions are equal and race is ignored – at least until Salmah, a Malay-Muslim woman from the capital, arrives with her mixed-race son to shatter the community’s composure.
“The Muhibbah Center for World Peace started with a thought experiment – what if someone had tried to respond to May 13 in this productive way? – and I had to follow that experiment along the path I thought it would have inevitably taken in Malaysia,” Preeta told Nikkei.
“Tale of the Dreamer’s Son” leapfrogs between the past and the present, using short chapters that read like a stream of consciousness and carry different titles and time stamps to help readers navigate what is often a jarring juxtaposition of events from 1970s Malaysia to 2023.
“Operation Lalang is actually far more central to the plot/protagonist’s life than May 13,” Samarasan said, referring to the detention of about 120 activists, artists and students in 1987, supposedly in a move to preempt further race riots.
“That said, I think May 13 is still central to Malaysia’s political landscape because we are still living the reality that was constructed as a response to that tragedy. Our language and economic policies, for a start, are its direct result.”
The fallout from the riots also underlies the long political supremacy of Umno, which gave “Malay chauvinism the power it continues to command today”, she said.
Even though “Tale of the Dreamer’s Son” does not focus primarily on the country’s ethnic issues, Preeta’s characters and dialogue resonate with the stereotypes and divisions that have made Malaysia’s fragmented ethnic patchwork the source of many gripes.
Masterfully interwoven across the decades that span the book’s plot, they become the underlying ghosts that haunt society and make the novel an unflinchingly realistic portrait of ethnic divide.
“I write about race and identity because I care about the people and communities I’ve left behind, even though I live in Europe,” Preeta said.
“I think that diasporas do tend to see things differently from people who still live in the homeland, but I don’t think either of these perspectives is inherently better. Each has its pros and cons.
“Being away gives me the ability to talk about what I see with relatively little risk or fear,” she added. “I’m aware that this is a privilege. Those back home may often see what I see too, they just prefer not to talk about it.”
