*a review of Peninsula (2016), A Malaysian Journey (1993), and Once We Were There (2017)
For a nation marking a year of significant milestones, complete with recent triumphs of both hosting and winning at the SEA Games circus, there is a glum Malaysia barely hiding in its equatorial shadows. Malaysia’s 60th independence day parades were previewed with officials openly worried about insufficient flag-waving, while the half-century anniversary of ASEAN’s co-founding by Malaysia barely registered across the peninsula. The multi-billion dollar 1MDB corruption scandal still swirls around the prime minister Najib Razak, with much-publicised investigations across several jurisdictions including the United States, Switzerland and Singapore still refusing to fade away. For an increasingly fractious post-colonial nation unused to such global infamy, the past decade’s apparent reversal of fortunes has been compounded by an Islamist politics propping up an uncertain government, narrowing the ways forward to any national redemption.
Unsurprisingly, in this malaise most keenly felt among Malaysia’s burgeoning middle-classes, there has been an appetite for literary and other cultural artefacts to explain how the nation is falling apart. After decades of steady upward trajectories, reflected in glowing World Bank and IMF report cards, Malaysia crashed through the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997–98 into a political crisis known as reformasi. Sparked off by the September 1998 sacking and jailing of charismatic deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim by Malaysia’s longest-serving leader, then-prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad, the reformasi movement for democratic change reverberates through Malaysia’s politics until today. And it’s this reformasi moment that provides the setting for Bernice Chauly’s debut novel Once We Were There.
But it was Malaysia’s best-selling book of 2016, Peninsula, and its author Rehman Rashid who provides the context and keys to understanding how a nation’s quest for prosperity means little without political and other freedoms prospering as well. Peninsula was the long-awaited sequel to Rehman’s best book, A Malaysian Journey, published 25 years ago and still a best-selling classic on today’s Malaysia. The two books have come to bookend the rise and rise of modern Malaysia, transformed like Rehman himself since the early 1980s into a parable of how sustaining a diverse nation created out of war and Britain’s empire-building is a constant, almost banal and unheroic effort of compromises and accommodations between disparate ethnic and religious communities, albeit in Malaysia’s case blessed by a huge bounty of natural resources and at a centuries-old global trade crossroads.
His journey had been prompted by Malaysia’s political crisis of 1987–88, when the dominant UMNO party of Dr Mahathir Mohamad split apart and presaged the 1987 crackdown known as Operation Lallang. The opposition both within the establishment and outside were terrorised throughout the night with mass arrests, many imprisoned without trial for years afterwards, and four newspapers were shut down. Rehman was already a beloved columnist of ‘Scorpion’s Tales’ in the then newspaper of record, the New Straits Times (NST). He wrote an editorial for the NST the day after the crackdown, rebuking the state in the state’s own newspaper. It won him a lengthy interrogation with the thuggish secret police chief (who was to later become the police chief who bashed a jailed Anwar Ibrahim a decade later).
The crackdown and its terrorised victims, many of whom Rehman knew well, shook his faith in the nation he had played a role in lucidly explaining and enabling. He told me years later how distressed he was over Operation Lallang, characteristically disappointed with himself as much as the Malaysia he soon left behind, when he moved to Hong Kong to join the region’s then premier news magazine, Asiaweek. He wrote starkly about his interrogation in A Malaysian Journey: “I wanted to be let go. I was scared. And he knew it, and believed it right and proper that I should be. I don’t think I shall ever forgive myself for that fear… May I never be scared again.”
Rehman always wore his heart on his florid sleeve, and he reflected the diversity of Malaysia himself. His father was an Indian-Muslim English school teacher who died young, and his mother was Eurasian, with roots half-century deep into the peninsula’s Portuguese and Tamil heritage. In the new nation of Malaysia, Rehman was constitutionally ethnic Malay, the majority category in Malaysia’s racialised politics that was subsequently formalised with distinct socio-economic privileges and known as Bumiputera, or ‘sons of the soil’, following the 1969 Kuala Lumpur riots that split the country apart.
For Rehman and many of his life-long boarding school comrades from the elite, Malay-only, Malay College Kuala Kangsar (MCKK), this ‘Bumiputera’ category was regarded with some ambivalence in recent years, as they saw the uses and abuses of the affirmative action policy known as the New Economic Policy (NEP). These abuses of the NEP have arguably corrupted the policy’s original ideals of redressing the economic inequalities defined by ethnicity. The NEP’s roll-out since the early 1970s is a salutary tale of how a nation-building policy can end up dividing a new nation along politically-defined racial, religious and party lines, where an economic program is instrumentalised in games of neo-feudal rewards, patronage and punishment. For Rehman, there was a yearning to belong to this Bumiputera community, despite the mediocrity the NEP inadvertantly shielded and which he disdained, sometimes brashly and loudly, in polite society.
Apparent throughout both A Malaysian Journey, and Peninsula years later, was Rehman’s passionate hope (and later lament) about the Malaysians he met who understood and revelled in the diversity of an unfinished nation. One reason A Malaysian Journey still resonates with Malaysians nearly a quarter-century later is that optimism, of the possibilities on the horizon, which Rehman weaved throughout the book with his own vividly polyglot story. It is a more coherent book about finding his centre and his home among other similarly mixed up fellow citizens under the Malaysian sun.
It was also these themes that first brought us together, soon after A Malaysian Journey’s publication in 1993 when I interviewed Rehman for an ABC series I made about the region’s booming media industry. Our shared enthusiasm for a plural Malaysia had him recruit me for a new Malaysian newspaper, The Sun, a year later. A few years after that, when I introduced Rehman to VS Naipaul in Kuala Lumpur, we both turned up to lunch with the same Naipaul book, Finding The Centre, for the author to sign. The search for this polyglot unicorn of a nation hadn’t ended when we last corresponded a few weeks before he fell into a fatal coma following his heart attack earlier this year.
Rehman blazed a trail in Malaysian letters with his honest, often unflinching first-person journalism, producing reportage that held up gaily painted mirrors to the changing face of modern Malaysia. These were reflections we had often shared in kopi tiam (Chinese cafes) whenever we met across the peninsula, sometimes literally reflected back at us when we sat nursing our black robusta-roasted coffees, the ornate kopi tiam mirrors which bore quaint greetings and names Rehman took great delight in noting down, accurately and unvarnished.
In an era of state-directed disinformation campaigns and the revved-up velocity of ‘fake news’, Rehman’s insistence on inviolable truths and accuracy in journalism now seems redolent of halcyon days. Whereas he once rued the lot of Malaysian journalists following the 1987 crackdown and its closure of newspapers in A Malaysian Journey, it was in Peninsula that he makes plain how much the online whirl has damaged all of us: “The depths of vitriol that had accumulated in the body politic over the first three generations of nationhood was sprayed all over ‘cyberspace’. Malaysia in the 21st century had the highest Internet penetration in Asean after Singapore, at nearly 70pc. The hunger for alternative media must have been a major driving force for this. Malaysia’s establishment media were effete and irrelevant. Print circulations had dropped to essentially their corporate clients, and the free-to-air broadcast media were an insipid, incompetent affront to most things Malaysian. The online explosion had almost nothing to do with unearthing new information, however, but providing vast new scope to blow off steam and vent furies to the cheers of thousands.”
Rehman was at his best when he told the stories of Malaysian lives at the cusp of major change, when he had been out travelling and translating his conversations up and down the peninsula. His narratives defined Malaysians coming to terms with the particular modernity and recumbent prosperity of the Mahathir years. His passion for a type of secular, ethnic Malay-elite led national narrative made for compelling reading when framed against the crude nativism and corruptions that have since corralled Malaysia’s governance in the past decade.
His often brutal frankness about the perceived shortcomings and slights of other Malaysians sat uneasily in the typically polite power salons he was invited into, burning many bridges and relationships along the way. But even as an ageing enfant terrible, he was his own harshest critic both in public and in private. Some of this comes through poignantly in his tribute to his former wife Rosemary in Peninsula, and astringently when he discussed his fears at the height of the Operation Lallang crackdown in A Malaysian Journey. Rehman was unafraid of identifying as a Malaysian patriot, who disdained the ethnic and religious divides that have come to define Malaysia. Yet he was also acutely aware of his access to that Malay, Muslim and aristocratic world that was Malaysia’s deep state, thanks to his elite MCKK school background, which enabled — as he recounted several times throughout Peninsula — his vividly using the old school ties over the decades for preferment and access.
The last time we met, before his ultimately fatal heart attack, Rehman was his charming self, more peaceful than I had known him to be in awhile, our voluble conversation over our favourite Malaysian coffee all about his beloved small town of Kuala Kubu Baru (KKB), about an hour north of Kuala Lumpur. He was about to publish a book, Small Town, about the colonial town that was his home for the past two decades. He also shared plans about writing a book on his alma mater MCKK, and explaining with hilarious asides about the school photos on his wall of where his generation’s cookies were baked (and how some had crumbled).
Rehman later recounted our encounter on his Facebook page, poignant and generous to a friend he had not seen in a few years. But it was our sporadic and continuing debate about how he saw himself in the Islam he was born into, and how this was increasingly the only marker that mattered as a Malaysian in the 21st century, that got us melancholy — there was the Muslim Malaysians, and the chasm that separated the ‘non’, possibly lesser Malaysians. Rehman felt alone, and lonely, in the end, writing in a language of text and imagination a diminishing number of younger Malaysians barely understood.
As he wrote in Peninsula: “The communalization of Muslims in this country would never sit easily with me, because it made of Islam a divisive force. Someone like me contained too much, too many religions, cultures, bloodlines and histories, and increasingly too much time on Earth, not to require an all-inclusive model of the Universe. But I was a stranger everywhere, in Malaysia as much as, if not more than, the world. I’d grown used to it by the time I lived long enough to be a senior citizen, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t so. I would have to make my way alone in life as best I could in a faith that could only countenance the solitary condition in three circumstances: penury, communicable disease, or insanity. It was just the way I was, so sue me… The intricacies of Islamic religious scholarship were so profound, I thought, and understanding so elusive, people in search of redemption could be driven into depression, despair and dementia. We needed better criteria of piety. ‘I know!’ I said. ‘What about happiness? How about, if you’re getting it right, you grin and laugh a lot?’ But happiness could be misleading or delusionary or something. It all got very tedious; I started feeling sorrier for them than I did for myself, and found my solace in the Gautama Buddha’s last reported words: ‘Work out your salvation with diligence.’ Ameen, brother.”
It’s passages like this, and his tribute to former wife Rosemary, who shared his Malaysian dream but was Catholic and ethnic Chinese-Malaysian, that make Peninsula a compelling read. But the newer bookend is much slighter and less cohesive as a book, that struggles to describe how the two decades have elapsed after A Malaysian Journey’s bravura tour. There are one too many perfunctory chapters which trade in blandly distilled history lessons, that cleave to state-mandated cliches about racialised communities, that toss in the north Borneo states and similar easy binaries about the burgeoning Malaysian diaspora abroad like cloves in diluted tea, much wan flavour without body. Peninsula could have been better edited, and my remark about this didn’t faze Rehman last year nor his publisher, old school friend and well-known art gallerist Jaafar Ismail. His long-time business collaborator Jaafar did much of the heavy lifting to get Peninsula out onto the Malaysian bookstands, where it has sold very well. Like with some of Rehman’s oldest, closest relationships, the relationship with his publisher was fraught and didn’t survive past Peninsula, forcing Small Town to be self-published.
But it’s the reportage that binds and holds together both books over the decades, that understandably makes Rehman’s reputation. And it was “getting out there, listening” that Rehman held dear, whether it is the beautiful passages in Peninsula about the countless kilometres he cycled in the hills and valleys around his KKB small town, or the year in Bermuda, or the village folks he has met along the way. His alienation from another Malaysia of the 21st century meant staying away, wary of a ‘fourth constituency’ demographic of elites he had inadvertantly been part of before his self-exile in his small town: “That ‘Fourth Constituency’ of ‘Malaysia-First’ Malaysians, then, became not exemplars of Malaysia as a nation, but just another demographic. And not a very important one at that, in numbers. They had the highest spending power and fuelled the country’s high-end consumer market and high-tech goods and services, but they were the least affected by national politics, other than emotionally. Self-sufficient, self-supporting and self-satisfied, they were the Malaysians least likely to vote and most likely to leave… The more Malaysian wealth became associated with connections, collusion and corruption and not with talent, effort and success, the more it was about ‘know-who’ and not ‘know-how’, the less was material prosperity an article of pride to the people.”
It’s this apparently disconnected urbanised elite, this secular tribe of ‘know-who’, that animates Bernice Chauly’s debut novel. Scattered with factoids throughout that are stitched together like a threadbare patchwork quilt to comfort a generation traumatised by the bust following Anwar Ibrahim’s sacking and jailing, the novel crashes through its looking-glass ‘reformasi’ era of the late 1990s with mangled passions. The novel’s protagonists complain about the suffocating authoritarian politics of the late 1990s crimping newly middle-class lifestyles, finding echoes across the region today as noisy democracy is rolled back in Thailand and Cambodia.
At the heart of Once We Were There is a love story, and a paean to resilient motherhood. There is also an important kernel of a tale of transgender sex workers trampled upon in Malaysia’s rush to modernity, where a tradition of multiple sexualities are narrowed into Islamist binaries. The novel’s billowing backdrop features photogenic deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim, touting his ‘Asian Renaissance’ persona/book and lauded in Western financial capitals as the region’s next generation star, crushed in a power struggle against his mentor Dr Mahathir Mohamad. The headlines were full of show trials over sodomy, corruption and lies, with salacious details of soiled mattresses and shady assignations breathlessly reported in government newspapers and television networks, all that illegal homosexuality sitting uneasily with otherwise straitlaced fare.
In the novel, the political convulsions of reformasi are often just pithy Instagram-like stage directions for the drama that engulfs the chief protagonist, journalist Delonix Regia. In between bouts of sweaty, sultry sex and much talk of romancing a revolution as elites are wont to do, the key characters produce a ground-breaking magazine called The Review and a subsequent website known as Saksi (or witness, in Malay). Delonix’s sequences of drugs, parties and the thudding bass of illegal raves soon gives way to the exigencies of motherhood and loss, as a tragic kidnapping breaks the spell.
The snapshots of that era’s optimistic media world and its hedonistic parties ring true, although the unexamined souls rushing between nights of passion and street protests by dawn make for a sad reminder two decades later of how easily in reality bourgeois activism was thwarted and sidelined by disciplined Islamists opposing Dr Mahathir’s regime in the fraught 1999 general elections. For those of us who lived through reformasi’s tumultuous times as Malaysians and as journalists, it was the extraordinary scenes of thousands of Malaysians, once divided along class and racial lines, uniting in street protests for weeks against authoritarianism that still resonate today. The novel makes a vain attempt to recall those exhilarating times of hope and smeared dreams amid the teargas, but the wretched utopias we harboured don’t survive the novel’s hollow protagonists.
Like her character Delonix, Chauly was working as a journalist at a ground-breaking magazine, Men’s Review, and was later a contributor and close friend of the website Saksi’s co-founder, Sumitra Viswanathan (or Sumi in the novel). The magazine was a rarity publishing slickly designed, erudite journalism that challenged the establishment’s propaganda known as ’Malaysia Boleh!’, and as the editor I was regularly warned about sailing too close to official oblivion. By the time Saksi was launched in the wake of the 1998 political crisis by my friends Sumitra and Sharaad Kuttan, we had resolved to pillory the toxic partisanship, with Saksi and new online news sites like Malaysiakini exposing the lies and spin used in the rewrites of official history.
Once We Were There is among the first Malaysian novels to explore what it meant to be part of that reformasi spin, when the tumultuous times suggested anything was possible, when the personal was political. Despite its many flaws, Chauly’s novel is a heartfelt addition to the paucity of books documenting those years of a nation finding itself after an intoxicating boom. As Joan Didion once noted, we tell ourselves stories in order to live. In Malaysia’s truculent, uncertain 21st century, too many Malaysians have too many stories still untold, in a nation now struggling to come alive •
