Revealing Fatimah's Secrets

... it was my experience of Maznoor and her family, and all the stories she told me (of her childhood, of her family, of her various houses and kampungs), that gave me the format for Fatimah’s Kampung ... A million little details eventually, and very slowly, came together: trips with Maznoor in Borneo forests and on the back roads around Selangor and Perak; visits to family graves; walks with my Batu Pahat brother-in-law into the forest of Gunung Soga and around Johor kampungs; explorations of building sites with my little niece Hanna; a visit to a keramat, a family wedding, my sister-in-law’s kitchen garden. Eventually, I found that I was celebrating Maznoor’s family, celebrating all I loved about Malaysia, and paraphrasing my old lectures in a more presentable way, all at the same time.

Fatimah's Kampung author, Iain Buchanan, is interviewed by Daphne Lee in Starmag today and also talks about how the book was created. You realise just what an incredible project and painstaking labour of love the book was.

Buchanan's Maznoor wife sums it all up beautifully :

We have no children but Fatimah’s Kampung is a deep and touching tribute to a loving life together. It took eight years to see the light of day but it will last to the end of our days and beyond.

Fatimah Goes to Penang

Something for the literati in Penang.

From Daphne :

Fatimah's Kampung will be launched on March 4 at 9am at the Balai Persiban Agung, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang. The book will be launched by the universiti's vice chancellor, YB. Prof. Tan Sri Dato' Dzulkifli Abdul Razak. Arndt Graf, associate professor of USM's school of humanities, and Daphne Lee, Star Publication's children's literature columnist, will review the book, and Iain Buchanan, the author and illustrator and writer of Fatimah's Kampung, will discuss his work at the launch. The event will conclude with a book signing by the author/illustrator.

The Multi-Talented and Environmentally Conscious at Seksan's

Saturday's Readings@Seksan was fun, and featured a lot of very talented people.

Shanthini Venugopal was telling me a very funny story as we cleared up after a previous event, and I told her it was too good to waste - write it down.

She did, and the story about how she lost her car in a shopping mall carpark was so hilarious I had to invite her to read it. She has such a finely tuned sense of the comic, such an ability to laugh at hersewlf, and an absolute love of hyperbole. I hope we will be hearing more from her.

Shanthini is a singer, actor, and director and founder of The Jumping JellyBeans theatre company for children ... among much else.

I encountered met Umapagan Ambikaipakan through his column in the New Straits Times when he opened up debate about The Great Malaysian Novel and we discovered a shared love of books. Uma was covering the American elections for the newspaper and caught the emotion of event very well indeed in the pieces he read for us.

Apparently he has written a novel, though he wasn't ready to share any of it with us yet, but we will be inviting him back soon ...

Now, this fellow is Brian Gomez who went missing in action last Readings. He read from his first, self-published novel. Devils' Place is one of the most exciting works of local fiction I've picked up recently.

It's funny, pacey, unpretentious, keenly observed, totally irreverent (how many more adjectives can I pile on here?) and features a large multiracial cast of characters in a complex and frequently farcical plot all of which he manages confidently.

If further evidence of Brian's talent is needed, please go and watch Lingam : The Musical on his blog. (Non-Malaysians will need some background to the affair.) I was laughing so much I almost choked.

Peter Hassan Brown and Markiza played us out of the first half, beautifully, with a song about a poor old polar bear coming to Malaysia and trying to find refuge from the heat in the air-conditioning.

Then we shared birthday cake and mandarin oranges, and many books were signed and sold. Yvonne Foong, who needs to raise funds once more for her medical treatment, was there selling her book and her latest Heart4Hope tee shirts. (You can read Yvonne's account here.)

Iain Buchanan showed us the original paintings for Fatimah's Kampung and read just one strand of the story - about the tiger. He talked about how dire the situation is for the planet, and how he hopes to spread the message more widely through this book than he managed to do as a university lecturer.

I made the mistake of saying the book was "almost too good for kids" but 84 year-old Gwen Smith leapt up and took me to task there and then. "Children deserve the best," she said. My words were eaten immediately without the benefit of chilli sauce.

(Daphne also picks me up on it here! Oooops.)

Here's Amir grinning away as only one who has already sold the first two print-runs of his latest book to a bookshop chain! (Malaysian Politicians Say the Darndest Things Vol. 2 will have a very sticky lauch on Valentine's Day and you are all invited.)

The book is a second compilation of politicians' quotes - many of them chuckle-worthy, all of them telling, and the excellent illustrations are by Fahmi Reza. (You can pre-order the book here.)


Saiful Nizam bin Shukor is a very hard-working young writer, working in the fantasy genre and hungry to get his work out into the world. He read us the very dramatic ending of one of his (as yet unpublished novels).

The multi-talented Saiful works as a freelance writer, scriptwriter, singer and is also a practicing medium!

After a couple more songs from Peter and Markiza we probably finished a bit later than we should have, but it was a very enjoyable event. I thanks sincerely all those who came and cheered writers on and bought their books, and all those who read or performed for out entertainment.

I thank Seksan for his magical space.

Also those friends who helped clean up. And whoever brought the pineapple tarts and crisps.

I hope to organise the event again on February 28th when among others we will have Marina Mahathir reading. Watch this space anyway for details!

Postscript :

Sufian's photos of the event are amazing!

When Fatimah Lost her Kampung

A few days ago I wrote about the launch of a children's book called Fatimah's Kampung by Iain Buchanan at Badan Warisan. I ended up being pretty late because I had decided to walk to Jalan Stonor from KLCC, along what I thought was a familiar route. I ended up getting lost, completely thrown by the way the area has changed since I was last there, with huge high-rises and building sites beginning to dominate this formerly green and peaceful enclave with its colonial bungalows.

I realise now, after reading the book, that there's a certain irony to all this - for Fatimah's Kampong is the story about how a landscape changes as the city encroaches, and how what is best about a place will be sacrificed to commercial interest.

In the introduction to the book Buchanan talks about how the book came to be written. He says he came to Malaysia first to teach shortly after Independence and that he took away with him a memory of the landscape which became part of him.

He continued to teach geography in a university in the East Midlands, and one day he had a call from one of his former students, Maznoor, now a college lecturer herself, coming to the UK to do a diploma in TEFL. They later married and Buchanan found himself part of a :

... large, lively, and very loving Malaysian family ..

But revisiting the landscape he had fallen in love with, he found that there was good reason to mourn :

... there was painted concrete, dead laterite and a gaudy brittle sameness ...

After taking early retirement, and wanting to communicate the ideas that he has lectured on in a way that was more vivid and exciting to young people, he began work on Fatimah's Kampung, a labour of love which took him eight years to complete, while Maznoor went out to work in a British factory to pay the bills. It was a true labour of love.

The book tells the story of a girl growing up in Kampong Hidayah. The family home was built by her great-grandfather with materials taken from the forest. When most of the other kampungs disappeared because of the expansion of the city it was allowed to remain untouched by the Sultan who owned the land.

Fatimah grows up amidst fruit trees, and forest (where she believes Pak Belang the tiger still might be hiding), and near to the frangipani filled graveyard where her relatives were laid to rest, and the keramat once home to a holy man who knew the ways of the forest in the way no others did.

The rhythms of kampong life of are recorded - her grandmother gathering herbs to cure ailments, the children's games, the visits by hawkers, Ramadan and the bustle of Hari Raya at the end of it, the monsoon floods.

But then the bulldozers move in and Fatimah and her family are forced to relocate to a high rise near by where they can see the final destruction of their kampung, and the forest around it.

There is one small mercy - the kampong house itself is to be saved and taken to be part of a new theme park which Fatimah gets the chance to visit.

Labelling books can sometimes do them a disservice, and whilst the book will undoubtedly appeal to older children (many of whom may have lived the story!), it will strike a chord with every Malaysian who cares about the environment and heritage, regardless of age, and will probably travel very well beyond these shores as the issues it raises are universal ones. I'm not ashamed to say that the story moved me to tears - especially the part where Fatimah finally does come face to face with her tiger.

But it is the stunning illustrations, with every detail of tree and leaf and kampung lovingly recorded, which make this book an absolute joy to own. (I have had to pries my copy out of the hands of visitors to the house who haven't wanted to put it down and talk to me!)

I wonder if Fatimah's Kampung might not be better described as a graphic novel and one that could easily become a classic of the genre?

The book is published by the Consumers Association of Penang, and this surprises on two counts. First of all, the organisation is known for its pamphlets on consumer and environmental issues and they have not, to my knowledge, ever undertaken a project like this before. Secondly, that they have made such a great job of it - this is a beautifully produced book that you could put beside any produced overseas and feel proud of.

Have I raved? Sorry. But I sincerely mean every word of praise I have heaped on this book.

But why not see for yourself? Iain will be appearing at Readings@Seksan this coming Saturday and a limited number of his books will be on sale.

Visiting Fatimah's Kampung

Something for Daphne Lee to cheer about!

Author and illustrator Iain Buchanan will be at Badan Warisan Malaysia this Saturday (17th) at 11.00 a.m. to talk about the creation of his new children's book Fatimah's Kampung.

Learn about his labour of love and grab this opportunity to see some of the large scale original art works that went into the making of this book.

This Malaysian Edition is published by the Consumers' Association of Penang and is available for purchase at Badan Warisan's Gift Shop. The book retails at RM65 per copy (paperback version).

Buchanan says about the book :

I needed to give my nieces and nephews, and their children, a picture of how wonderful the world can be - and a warning of how barren we can let it become; I needed to do this in a way which young and old could share, which would appeal to reason - and which would touch the heart as well.

So I set out to rescue, from those twenty years of lectures, a picture book for children about the life and death of a landscape. I wanted to tell the story of a forest, a village, and a city, and the succession from one to the other. I wanted to capture the drama of the change, what it meant to the landscape and the people who lived in it; and I wanted to do this in a way that could celebrate the detail of life, its different scales, textures, colours - from the broad panorama of a forest or a city skyline, to the minutiae of things, like the fretwork on a balcony or the ants on a leaf. A book like this, I reckoned, would do all I needed to do: it would celebrate the joys that Malaysia had given me.

Badan Warisan Malaysia is at No 2 Jalan Stonor, 50450 Kuala Lumpur.

To register, please call Yuana at the Secretariat, tel: 03 - 2144 9273 or e-mail: heritage@badanwarisan.org.my

Incidentally, Iain Buchanan will be appearing at this month's readings@seksan on 31st January. (More details later.)