Elaine Chiew Chats With Professor Malachi Edwin Vethamani, Malaysian poet and short story writer.

Photo Credit: Chris Leong

Malachi Edwin Vethamani is a Malaysian-born Indian poet, writer, critic, bibliographer and professor. He is currently Head, School of English, University of Nottingham Malaysia. He has two volumes of poems, Complicated Lives (2016) and Life Happens (2017), and a collection of short stories, Coitus Interruptus and Other Stories Happens (2017). His research on Malaysian literature in English led to the publication of A Bibliography of Malaysian Literature in English (2015) and two edited volumes of Malaysian literature which cover 60 years of Malaysian poetry, Malchin Testament: Malaysian Poems (2017) and short-stories, Ronggeng-Ronggeng: Malaysian Short Stories (2020).

 

EC: Welcome to Asian Books Blog, Malachi. Great to have you here. Your most recent publication, an anthology of short stories which you compiled and edited, Ronggeng-Ronggeng, has a Table of Contents that reads like a Who’s Who in the Malaysian short story. What was the impetus for this project, what are your hopes for the anthology, and how did you go about the selection process? 

 

MEV: I wanted to bring together a volume of short stories that is representative of Malaysian short story writing from the 1950s till the present. The two existing significant collections of short stories were compiled and edited by Lloyd Fernando in 1968 and 1981 and were republished in 2005 but are generally unavailable. Ronggeng-Ronggeng is one of the outcomes of my research on Malaysian literature in English and I wanted a volume of Malaysian short stories that showcased the works of a range of writers, the new, emerging and the established. I read all the published works that were available and then went on to select the stories and get permission from the writers to include their works for this collection. It is my hope that this collection will contribute to more scholarship on Malaysian literature in English.

 

EC: In your illuminating precis on the development of the short story as a form in Malaysia, you wrote that Malaysians writing in English have a distinct flavour, for example, in the use of Manglish or other vernacular – how important is it to retain this characteristic within the tradition of a national literature, and how has this played out nationally versus internationally, where big publishing houses may not yet recognise or appreciate local tongues and the hybridity it brings to British English as a global (though colonial) standard?

 

MEV: I believe that it is essential that Malaysian writing in English is recognisable as a distinct flavour both in the linguistic and literary dimensions. Malaysian English, in its full spectrum, ranges from the standard form to the non-standard form (Manglish). Between these two poles, there is a range of Malaysian English which contributes towards a national identity. This emerges not only in the linguistic forms but also in the literary dimension, the idiomatic expressions and local images that are used in the works. The multi-cultural mix in Malaysia further contributes to the hybridity in Malaysian English. It is a part of World Englishes, just as British English is a variety of the English language. The fact that Malaysian writers have won international literary prizes is indicative of the contribution Malaysian writers make to contemporary Literature in English worldwide. Sadly, at the national level, Malaysian writing in English remains in the margins as it is not considered part of national Malaysian literature as only literary works in Bahasa Melayu (the Malay language) is included in this literary canon.

Dark Chapter: Award Winner and Activist Winnie M Li Talks to Elaine Chiew About Her Novel Centred On Rape and A True Story

Credit: Grace Gelder

Bio: 

Winnie M Li is an author and activist, who has worked in the creative industries on three continents. A Harvard graduate, Winnie’s career as a film producer in London was disrupted, at the age of twenty-nine, by a stranger rape in Belfast. Since then she has focused on addressing the issue of sexual violence through the media, the arts, and academia. 

Aside from her award-winning novel Dark Chapter, Winnie writes across a range of media, including short fiction, theatre, journalism, and memoir. She has received grants from the Royal Society of Literature, Jerwood Arts, Arts Council England and Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Winnie is also Co- Founder and Artistic Director of the Clear Lines Festival, the UK’s first-ever festival addressing sexual assault and consent through the arts and discussion. Her PhD research at the London School of Economics explores media engagement by rape survivors as a form of activism. She holds an honorary doctorate from the National University of Ireland, in recognition of her writing and advocacy for women’s rights. She is based in London. You can find more information about her at her website.

Synopsis:

Vivian is a cosmopolitan Taiwanese-American tourist who often escapes her busy life in London through adventure and travel. Johnny is a 15-year-old Irish teenager, living a neglected life on the margins of society.

On a bright spring afternoon in West Belfast, their paths collide during a horrifying act of violence.

In the aftermath, each is forced to confront the chain of events that led to the attack.  Vivian must struggle to recapture the woman whom she once was, while dealing with a society that judges and pities assault victims. Johnny, meanwhile, seeks refuge in his transitory Irish clan. But when he is finally brought to reckon for his crimes, Vivian learns that justice is not always as swift or as fair as she would hope. Inspired by true events, this is a story of the dark chapters and chance encounters that can irrevocably determine the shape of our lives.

A Fire of Love and Protest: On Writing All Flowers Bloom

Kawika Guillermo’s second novel, All Flowers Bloom, is a queer speculative revision of histories and imagined futures. In this post Kawika discusses the persistent theme of love, including both self-love and love for others, and offers a view on how love (or a lack of love) is related to the race-focused protests currently happening across the United States and the world.

Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

– James Baldwin, “In Search of a Majority: an Address,” 1960

My first novel, Stamped: an anti-travel novel, detailed the dejection that many people of color felt during the Bush years, and their attempts to self-exile in the face of the war atrocities committed in the “war on terror.” Hating their own country, the novel’s characters can’t help but hate themselves. They idealize suicide. They transport drugs. They become violent. Their stories reflect my own feelings of loss and anger during those years, when I lived and traveled abroad.

If Stamped documents my feelings of self-hate, All Flowers Bloom documents my journey learning to love myself. The novel follows two souls who reincarnate throughout human history, and whose love survives war, famine, and their own deaths. In every life, their love blooms in times of intense political change: the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem, the British colonization of India, the Philippine-American War, and political upheavals far, far into the future. 

When I met my wife, I was writing All Flowers Bloom. Three years later, when she gave birth to our son, I was still writing it. All Flowers Bloom represents my transition from an angry, dejected ex-patriate, into a father, a husband, a son-in-law, a lover of love itself. And yet, the book’s roots remain deeply political, and angry.

I began this reflection with Baldwin’s often-cited quote, “love is a growing up,” because Baldwin himself saw love as a distinctly political act. He saw the bus boycotts and youth marches of the late 1950s as love speaking, love coming from the downtrodden who still had hope that their white oppressors could change. Protest was a way of tearing down walls, a way of saying “we are bound together forever. We are part of each other.”

The Bitter Peace by Philip S. Jowett - Conflict in China 1928-1937

Chinese history has long been ignored in the West, but a few spotlights do shine out from time to time on certain events, even if only to provide superficial understanding. These usually point to the Opium Wars, the Boxer Rebellion, and, recently, the Sino-Japanese War. However, there is a small window of time in Chinese history that contained multiple smaller wars, which has almost been completely ignored by Western scholars. This brief era is what The Bitter Peace – Conflict in China 1928-37 by Philip S. Jowett illuminates.

Tsundoku #11 - July 2020

If you're out of lockdown lucky you - you can go to the park and read. If you're still in lockdown then you can stay in and read. It's all reading...and so this July here's some choices. Admittedly publishers are still defering lots of titles to later in the year in the hope of more bookshops getting back in business and the return of browsers, but still...

Debasmita Dasgupta: It’s Time to Tell the Truth to our Children

Debasmita Dasgupta is a Singapore-based, Kirkus Best Prize nominated illustrator and graphic novelist. She enjoys illustrating fiction, non-fiction, and poetic works for children and young adults. Debasmita is also passionate about art-for-change, and has created an online movement called My Father Illustrations to promote child rights for girls and better father-daughter relationships.

Debasmita’s debut independent graphic novel, Nadya, came out this year. Nadya deals with the subject of divorce from the point of view of a 13-year old adolescent girl living in the mountains. It has just been nominated for the Neev Book Award for distinguished children’s literature.

Despite the fact that divorce becoming quite a common phenomenon in many families in Asia / India, often it is still considered to be a taboo subject. Debasita hopes that her graphic novel will encourage open conversation about difficult family topics. Below, she reflects on the process of writing Nadya and her personal encounters with families going through divorce.

Nicky Harman on The Book of Shanghai: some exciting writing talent and excellent translators

As a follow-up to Rosie Milne's post on THE BOOK OF SHANGHAI, I have been thinking about what makes a good introduction to contemporary Chinese literature, and what can persuade new readers to dip a toe in unknown waters. Logically, short stories should be a good way in, because length-wise, they don’t require too much commitment. But I am someone who loves to immerse myself in a full-length novel, so I approached The Book of Shanghai with, let’s say, an open mind.

Historically, Shanghai has had a powerful grip on the western imagination. Of course, it was always much more than the exotic den of iniquity it was portrayed as. As Jin Li, one of the editors, writes in his excellent introduction, ‘The influences of a recently industrialized West mingled, interacted and cross-pollinated with the traditions of a culture that had developed over many centuries. As a contact point between East and West, with its unique location, Shanghai paved the way, acting as a testing site where various ideological and cultural ideas were welcomed, accommodated and re-imagined.’

But that was then, and now is now. In The Book of Shanghai, the picture emerges of a thoroughly modern city. These stories scarcely even hint at Shanghai’s exotic or insalubrious past. Instead, they describe the human condition as it is today. Not that all the stories are realistic. Some are quite fantastical and have beguilingly strange protagonists. But all of them are rooted in the present... or the future.