This new book borrows its title from an older book to which it refers back...
Comparing the two should be fun...
Title: Malay Sketches
Author: Alfian Bin Sa'at
Date of first U.S. publication: 2018, scheduled to arrive in stores in March
Publisher: Ethos Books (Singapore 2012); Gaudy Boy LLC (U.S. 2018)
ISBN: 2370000584786
Length: 212 pages total; 184 pages of text; 5-page glossary
Quote: "[W]hat if it's less than 500 words?"
What if a story is less than 500 words? Then it might be called a "sketch," like the quick verbal drawing of a classroom on page 55 (quoted above), which is about 150 words. Several of Sa'at's "sketches" fit comfortably onto one 5x8" page with plenty of white space.
A sketch is a quick rough drawing intended to form the outline of a finished painting, or, by extension, a quick verbal description of a scene or character that may later be expanded into a short story, novel, nonfiction book, or portion of one. In fact, Sa'at tells us, one of his Malay Sketches has grown into a short story that appears in this collection:
Taken together, "sketches" were often published as travel books, like Frank Swettenham's 1895 Malay Sketches, in which Swettenham claimed to have verbalized what he'd observed of "the soul of the Malay." How much it's possible to observe of anybody's soul has always been debatable, but it speaks well of Swettenham that, over a hundred years later, a Malay reader was able to read his book and respond with a polite update showing what he has observed living Malay souls doing lately.
The result can be described as a polite book. There are an abortion, a psychotic case, a teenaged single mother, a dead body (with symptoms that suggest AIDS) cleaned for burial, a drug user whose sobering up in prison becomes the "Sacrifice" for another drug user who decides to sober up before being arrested, all described clearly but tersely and tastefully. Mostly we see "normal" Malay people, decent human beings doing jobs, bringing up children, worrying about questions of ethics and etiquette.
Most of these people are Muslims. The world has seen too much of fanatical Muslims, protesting political matters through terrorism or hoping to recruit God to their side by enforcing ridiculously extreme rules, and one might have hoped that the fanatics would have noticed it not working. That is not what the majority of Muslims are like, or what they do. This web site has been disappointed that the majority of Muslims are too loyal to publish sterner denunciations of the fanatics, but the one thing that stands out when I think of the Muslims I've known is that they are loyal people--people who value loyalty, who write, read, retell, and debate stories about conflicts of loyalties. When Sa'at's Malay Sketches develop a character far enough to show a conflict, many of them show conflicts of loyalties to persons, groups, or ethical values.
In this collection, the first sketch is of a Singaporean man of Chinese descent whose name expresses conflict between loyalty to the relatives who call him Jason and loyalty to his Malay Muslim wife, Hawa, whose family call him Jamal. The second is of a "Top Malay-Muslim Student" with a conflict between loyalty to the "protocol" that students should shake the president's hand, and loyalty to the religious rule that she should avoid physical contact with the opposite sex. We meet a grandmother for whom "feeding the neighbourhood cats was a kind of penance" for having been unable to bring a feral cat she used to feed along when she moved from a kampung (village) into the city. A young doctor is torn between empathy for a patient and disgust with the patient's bad choices. The mother of the girl who has the abortion offers to "raise him like my own son"; the girl rationalizes the abortion by saying "I want to give you a grandchild." A teenaged boy realizes that he has "become, by virtue of his education alone, the equal of someone whom his father served and ferried." A university student bickers about whether posing for a family portrait is trying to "be Chinese," as opposed to Malay, but confesses that his real objection to the portrait is that he thinks it will embarrass his sister, who, in her last year at "an arts college," seems unlikely to go to university. This theme of conflict of loyalties continues into the last sketch that borders on being a story (the next to last sketch), where an elementary student "spends half of his weekdays in school and this somehow splits his allegiances in half" between his mother and his teacher.
Folklore is another motif that connects several sketches. What may catch some readers' attention are the wonderfully gruesome ghosts and monsters of Malay legend; four sketches are titled "A __ Story," and in each one the "__" is filled in with the name of a traditional horror figure. One called the hantu tetek crushes victims with what appear to be breasts; a character considers some ways this monster might be imagined, leading up to one that, in a way, might be considered real. A vampirelike creature called hantu kumkum comes to mind as a wife realizes that her husband has become morbidly vain. Another vampirelike fantasy, the pontianak, appears in the more disturbing sketch about the schizophrenic patient. The fourth, the toyol, is more like a poltergeist and appears in a sketch that readers may remember as sad, scary, or might-as-well-laugh-as-cry funny, about memory loss. Other stories refer to traditional beliefs; "Cold Comfort," for instance, plays on the idea that a "cold uterus"--probably originally a reference to getting through a pregnancy without running a fever--indicates a blessed birth, a healthy, successful, lucky son.
Isrizal Mohamed Isa, in his foreword, directs readers' attention to those of the sketches that deal with "issues that are pinning down certain segments of the community...detention without trial, terminal diseases (an allusion to HIV), class disparity and race relations for instance," in what Jee Leong Koh describes as "the doubly minoritized Malay-Muslim community in Singapore." On pages 148-149, a sketch of a Malay student in New York City clarifies the idea of "race relations" for U.S. readers:
"Some of her classmates thought she was Filipino, while others assumed she was Latino. When she mentioned that she was from Singapore, there was a momentary look of understanding...which Hidayah knew was actually a misunderstanding. The next minute would be spent explaining that Singapore was not part of China, was nowhere near Hong Kong or Taiwan, and that she was not Chinese."
Several stories hint that Malay Muslims in Singapore feel disadvantaged relative to neighbors of Chinese descent; in "Shallow Focus," mentioned above, the graduate student's mother retorts that Chinese families are more likely to send their children through university, and in "Cold Comfort" the young woman says bitterly, "Guys like you...usually go for Chinese girls." "Two Brothers" adds details about the 75% majority status of ethnically Chinese residents of Singapore: "Did you ever think they'd hire bus drivers from China one day? Who can't speak a word of English?" one brother asks, complaining that their parents always used to speak "to their Chinese neighbours in Malay. And for our generation, we used English. What do you think the next generation will use?" The character complains further of "that whole policy to keep the Chinese in Singapore at 75 percent...their numbers need to be topped up by the Chinese from overseas. So...Which comes first then? Being Singaporean or being Chinese?" Then again, some other characters think Singapore would benefit from merging into Malaysia, and the other of the "Two Brothers" has "heard that in Malaysia, it's easier to become a resident if you're Indonesian."
A sad-funny character is called Bob: "'Bob'...was used to describe any Malay guy who was a little on the plump side, dark-skinned, and who was involved in audio engineering...if a 'Bob' was more plump than usual, he would be called 'Bobo'." Bob is more than merely attracted to a woman with whom he can discuss Malay musicians because she, too, has an English-sounding name that, paired with his on Facebook, he thinks will suggest the way musicians called Ramlee and Saloma use "Remy and Sally." For him, using a nickname is an intimacy; for her, a barricade against intimacy.
References to "class disparity" are more subtle, perhaps due to censorship or cultural pressure. Singapore is classified as a democratic republic, after all. And yet...in "Overnight," "For her son's ninth birthday, Farisha decided to buy him a tent" and share "her earliest memories...of the sea." She chats with other women camping on the beach about how "The government took away our kampung...and they gave us camping." They've brought enough food to share with people who pass a guitar around and sing, and only in the morning do they notice that some of the other campers are, in fact, homeless. Someone shouts "I don't want to see your face here again," and a woman "was pleading, 'We have nowhere else to go'."
A few of the sketches can be considered protests. In "The Drawer," a woman hides the headscarf her daughter likes to wear, as a sign of Muslim identity, because she believes the headscarf is keeping her daughter from being offered jobs. In "A Howling," a middle-aged woman feels the need to speak to a couple her own age about a young Muslim employee's being asked to care for a dog. In "Proof," what a child identifies as "the ustazah," a Muslim woman who teaches the basics of religion to other women, is actually closer to what Americans call a social worker--from a prison--and what she's come to discuss with the child's mother is, "You didn't visit your husband...He always looks forward to your visits."
"Then what about me?...You keep him for two years, and then you say he's not ready, and you keep him for another two, and another," complains the wife. She is tired of being a single mother ("The best job all of you can find me is as a cleaner"), and "The boys need a father...if it's not him it'll have to be someone else. I'm going to ask for a divorce."
Afterward, the social worker wonders what to report: "The promise of a reunion with his family was one of the things that had made her husband co-operative at the detention centre. But what if...it was her way of exerting some pressure on them to release her husband. Should she mention...her suspicion that Suriati had not been entirely truthful?"
Then there's "The Sendoff," a five-page sketch that could be published as a short story. Though the last line is slightly predictable, the story is still intense; the subject is an interview with a hangman.
Who should read this book? Malay Sketches is probably accessible to "Young Adult" readers, and a more parent-pleasing choice than many of the dystopias and sex/drugs/crime stories written for and about U.S. teenagers. The language is generally a readable, international-type English, with most of the Malay words either explained at length in the text or briefly translated in the glossary. The book feels light in the hand. Nevertheless, it's addressed primarily to adults, and this middle-aged reader felt that Sa'at has more to say to adults than many writers of short stories. None of the sketches is a mere romance or adventure; most of them go deeper into more challenging and "literary" themes. For its size Malay Sketches is a substantial read.
This is a brand-new book, so please buy it directly from its U.S. publisher, Gaudy Boy, using the Amazon link above.
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