Double Preeta

I picked up two magazines today which both contain articles I've written on Preeta Samarasan. And both also have a plenty more great book related stuff to read.

Preeta is cover girl of MPH's Quill magazine (free to cardholders, RM8 to others, at branches of MPH) with a gorgeous portrait photo taken by top New York-based photographer Miriam Berkley who talks about her work and about what makes a great author photo inside.

The piece on Preeta here is an e-mail interview in which I ask her about the starting point of her novel, how far the family in the novel is based on her own (perish the thought!), how doing an MFA helped her and whether writing from outside the country gives her more freedom to write honestly. Do go pick up a copy to find out the answers! Preeta herself writes a very interesting piece - No More Dirty Laundry : In Defence of Fiction.

In other pieces I enjoyed, Chet writes about her "torrid affair with digital books" (!) ; Lydia gives poor, mistreated books a voice; Amir Muhammad (who seems to have the scary ability of getting everywhere these days!) reviews Adibah Amin's Glimpses; Daphne Lee writes about one of my favourite Scottish folk heroes Tam Lin; Yang May Ooi talks about her encounters with British food and Saradha Narayanan talks about hanging up her stethoscope to become an author.

The other magazine is Off the Edge and my piece about Preeta here is a review of Evening is the Whole Day. I am so happy that Jason Tan gave me the space I needed.

There are the usual thought-provoking articles about politics and the arts, and the more literary things include another episode in the life of Kam's Datuk, and the second extract from Kee Thuan Chye's The Swordfish and Then the Concubine, as well as reviews of two recent publications from The Edge Publications, Shape of a Pocket by Jacqueline Anne Surin, and Tipping Points : Viewpoints on the Reasons for and Impact of the March 8 Election Earthquake. Benjamin McKay reviews Shanon Shah's play Air Con.

Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah is the cover boy here, and the subject of a very lengthy interview with Jason. I wonder if he will still be able to mount a challenge for the presidency of UMNO and really hope so.

* (The piece is not online at the moment - but may be later.)

Preeta Samarasan Interview part 2

Continued from yesterday ...

Your former writing teacher Peter Ho Davies has compared your writing to Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy in the blurb he wrote for the novel. How far did you absorb the influences of these, and indeed other favourite authors?

It would be disingenuous and ungrateful for any postcolonial writer worth his or her salt to deny Rushdie’s influence. Rushdie gave us the permission to speak (though he would probably not phrase it that way himself: I suppose you could say he showed us that we could give ourselves permission to speak), and he gave us the language with which to speak. His impact on postcolonial writing in English is immense. I’ve been inspired by him on many levels: by the energy of his language, by his elevation of Indian English into poetry, by his use of magical realism to depict events and emotions too large for conventional Western realism. I think of Arundhati Roy as someone who inherited these ideas and made them her own instead of simply imitating Rushdie, and I tried my best to do the same: to absorb their influence, digest it, and come up with something entirely my own. But no, the comparison doesn’t bother me in the slightest; I’m flattered, really, because I’ve always seen them as major influences. Other major influences of which I was very conscious while working on this novel: Waterland by Graham Swift (from which I took one of the novel’s epigraphs); Bleak House by Charles Dickens.

The writing is gorgeous with every sentence so perfectly crafted and images on every page that are fresh and surprising. Was this a writing style that was particularly hard won?

Thank you -- what lovely praise! A writer, as Thomas Mann said, is one for whom writing is more difficult than it is for others. Writing this book was the hardest thing I have done in my life so far. I did a massive amount of revision, because in the beginning my learning curve was so steep that by the time I got to the middle of the book I would hate everything I’d written. This happened four or five times. My standards were getting higher and I was learning so much about myself as a writer, about my voice, my priorities, etc. I had revised the first half or so an uncountable number of times before I even applied to MFA courses. Then I revised the first few chapters four or five times in the MFA program. Once the novel was sold I revised the entire thing twice with my editor at Houghton-Mifflin -- these were major, major revisions, the first of which involved cutting more than half of what I’d written. Then I worked with a copyeditor on smaller scale revisions. The novel was sold in the summer of 2006, and I just finished my last revisions with the copyeditor late last year (2007). So yes, it’s been a long, hard road.

Did you find it hard to let go of your manuscript in the end?

At the very end, no, it wasn’t difficult to let go, because I felt ready and the book felt ready. I felt like I’d been pregnant for eight years. Get this thing out of me!

The story moves incrementally back in time for the most part, slowly revealing the motivations and back stories of your characters – how did you decide that this was the way that you wanted to tell your story?

I experimented with so many structures before it finally hit me: the reader needed to already know what was going to happen in the end, so that the weight of that ending would imbue everything that came before. There’s a certain inevitability that film scenes or photographs from the historical past exude, that the present can never quite match. The simplest way to give my narrative that kind of gravity -- to make the whole thing past instead of present -- was not through frequent and coyly oblique flash forwards (oh, how annoying they were!), but by moving backwards from the end. The further back the narrative goes, the more significance every little detail gains, so that by the time we reach the end (which is really the beginning), I don’t have to do much to expose the sadness inherent in that hopeful beginning. When I read Graham Swift’s Waterland, the idea of moving backwards began to seem inevitable. As he says (and I paraphrase), we’re always asking why, why, why; as human beings, we’re always wondering how far back in time we would’ve had to go to “fix” this or that present problem. I wanted my novel to enact that obsessive backtracking literally.

How did you decide on the rather god-like omniscient narrative voice?

I have always had a thing for that grand nineteenth-century voice. I like sweeping stories and authoritative narrators; in this, I’m a bit old-fashioned because that god-like narrator has fallen out of favour, particularly in America. But the stories I love best have big, bold narrators who refuse to explain how they know what they do (the narrator of Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda, for example: logically speaking, he should not know nine tenths of what he does!). As a writer, I love the power and freedom that that narrative voice gives me.


What has the path to publication been like for you?

Ah, another significant benefit of MFA programs: agents come to visit the good ones, because they are constantly scouting for new talent. My agent came to visit in my first year of the course, and I signed with her well before I graduated. Compared to the writing itself, the path to publication has been surprisingly easy. The novel was sold within a few days of my completing a reasonable draft, the summer after I graduated with my MFA. My agent sent it out to only three publishers in the US, and two of them offered to buy it. After the revisions were done, it sold very fast in other countries -- much faster than any of us had expected.

One comment made recently by Silverfish Books proprietor Raman Krishnan is that all the Malaysian novelists who are becoming successful on the world stage (such as Tan Twan Eng, Tash Aw, Rani Manicka) are writing from outside the country. Does being outside of things here in some sense free you up to write more honestly, and do you think you could have written the same book if you had stayed here?

It’s too easy to say, Of course, of course one has to leave to be a writer, of course people who never leave don’t see the same things about their country. But I actually believe the reality is slightly different. I think writers are people who identify as outsiders whether or not they have the opportunity to leave physically. Frequently, they identify as outsiders from childhood, though they are not always sure why -- sometimes it’s simply a matter of temperament. Perhaps those who feel they’re outsiders are more likely to leave, and that’s why so many writers -- not just Malaysian writers -- have been expatriates at some point. But they don’t have to leave to feel like outsiders. Conversely, plenty of people leave but never give up their unquestioning patriotism: Nothing like Malaysia lah! So, to answer the rest of your questions: I think I would have still written, and I think I would have made many of the same observations about Malaysia if I hadn’t left. But one thing would probably been different: I don’t think I would’ve been brave enough to say these things as loudly as I’m saying them now. Like most Malaysians, I had lots of unexamined fears when I lived in the country. Fears of the government, fears of What People Will Think -- between those two, it’s hard to say which is the greater set of fears! I think of my expatriate status as a luxury that allows me to say what I want without these fears.

You are the first Malaysian novelist that I have read who actually ventures into the events of May 13 1969, and it has been little discussed even in non-fiction. (Lloyd Fernando’s 1993 novel Green is the Colour being a notable exception.) Why did you decide to place your characters right in the heat of the fighting? Did writing about that incident take particular courage?

Writing that doesn’t take courage is not worth doing. Serious fiction (and nonfiction!) should take on the hard subjects -- whether they are hard for emotional or political reasons, or both. Which is not to say that other novelists have not chosen other hard subjects -- there are plenty of hard subjects in Malaysia, more than enough to go around! In my case, this novel is so much about race that to leave out May 13th would’ve seemed like a glaring omission. I also wanted to include May 13th precisely because it has been little discussed in Malaysia, and I think it’s the job of writers to talk about the things people don’t want to talk about. Race defines everything in Malaysia, and yet, ridiculously, it is a “sensitive” subject. Historically, writers have been the consciences and voices of their nations -- that may sound presumptuous, but I really believe it very strongly -- so if you’re going to abdicate that responsibility, you may as well do something else for a living. As to why I put my characters right in the heat of the fighting -- the only way to get into it, to immerse the reader fully in the event, was to put some of my characters there. They needed to experience it directly, not just hear about it.

Why did you decide to handle this part of the book in such an abstract way – with the personified Truth and Rumour dancing in the streets?

This is the very best sort of question -- something I hadn’t even thought about myself until you asked it! Now that I have to articulate it, I think it has everything to do with Rushdie’s explanation of magical realism, which I’ve referenced above. I wish I could find the essay in which he talks about this, but the basic idea is that some events and emotions are so huge that they don’t seem to be governed by the laws of realism. The best magical realism captures what the incident feels like in a way that a “realistic” portrayal could never have captured it. In that part of the book I’m resorting both to magical realism and to allegory, because I also want to get across the idea that Truth and Rumour have taken on lives of their own, become actual characters. And I think this is still true in Malaysia today. We are still a nation mesmerized by Rumour’s sexy moves. “Eh, people say....” “I heard somewhere....” “It seems....” And then, bit by bit, the “people say” is dropped and the rumour becomes true. If I had ten sen for every time I heard a rumour presented as if it were truth, I’d be able to buy myself a mansion in KL with just that money.

Malaysian novelists based overseas have sometimes been accused of “exoticising” this country for a Western readership. You seem to have deliberately gone the other way. Was this a deliberate decision?

I had an interesting discussion on exoticism the other day with another Malaysian storyteller (Amir Muhammad). He pointed out that “exotic,” in its original definition, simply meant strange. And to highlight the strangeness of our culture -- that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and some of the best books consciously try to be strange. But I think now when we complain about “exotic” writing we often mean writing that isn’t strange anymore -- writing that merely trots out the same tired clichés about Asia. I’m not referring to any recent Malaysian novel; this is a general observation. On the surface such writing may appear to be pointing out unusual details, yet the choice of details, and the very way in which they are pointed out, is formulaic. The problem with this kind of writing is often that it self-consciously sets out to teach people about a particular culture, which is simply not the job of literature. The narrator takes you by the hand and explains everything; nothing is allowed to remain strange. So, to extrapolate from what Amir said, the writer is not exoticising but de-exoticising. I suppose what I’ve tried to do -- and yes, I have thought about this in great depth because it’s a question on which I have very strong feelings -- is to maintain the real strangeness of the place that is Malaysia. Which lies not in the images any Tourism Board advertisement can show you, but in the things we do not want to talk about. If on occasion -- for example, when it comes to ideas about class -- this strangeness makes us similar to other cultures instead of different from them -- well, all the better, because Western readers don’t expect similarities and are invariably excited to discover them.

I was delighted to see that you have used a lot of local words, particularly Tamil expressions, and you neither provide a direct translation nor italicize them. Why did you decide to do it this way?

Well, I was delighted that my publishers never even questioned that decision. I didn’t know what to expect, but from the beginning I wanted to weave the local words into the narrative in the natural way we do in Malaysia. We don’t translate, and we certainly don’t pause to note the non-Englishness of the word, which I think is the effect italicization has: ATTENTION! PLEASE NOTE FOREIGN WORD HERE! To us it’s all one language, our language, and I really wanted to preserve that. The way we talk -- our hybrid vocabulary, our loose syntax, our breathless lack of punctuation -- embodies our collective character in ways I think most people reading this interview will understand. If I’m going to presume to speak for Malaysians, I should try as far as possible to remain faithful to the way they would say these things themselves.

The obvious reaction is: But won’t this make it harder for your Western readers? Perhaps a little, though I think in many cases the gist of what’s being said is clear from the context, or the specific detail is not so important that a non-Malaysian reader will lose track of the story if they don’t grasp the detail. It’s a price I was willing to pay, because it’s also somewhat of a political choice. Other postcolonial writers have said this far better than I can (I’m thinking, in particular, of Jamaica Kincaid), but what I would say to any Western reader who complains is: the West is not the centre of the universe. Fifty, even thirty years ago, we were all taught to believe it was. Schoolchildren studying literature in the colonies had to navigate Cockney speech patterns, imagine for themselves what toad-in-the-hole might taste like, picture moors and bogs and fens and determine the emotional significance of each of these landscapes. Now we get to tell our own stories, and this requires your dealing with my rubber estates and char kuay teow and cursing in Tamil. In the long run, this will be good for all of us. A little cultural immersion never did anyone any harm.

It might seem too early to ask this, but what’s next?

I’m working on another novel, set mostly in Cameron Highlands. I’m not sure I can say more than that at this point! I’m very much at the groping-in-the-dark stage and I fear saying too much will paralyse me. So far it seems as if this one will not take me so many years -- I’m keeping my fingers crossed. I’m also writing short stories and revising old ones. A couple of my stories will be published in the next few months in literary journals in the US. In the past I’ve considered putting together a collection, so we’ll see if that happens.

Chiew-Siah's Leap of Faith

When I was 10 years old, the teacher began to teach us composition in the Chinese school. I wrote my first one and he liked it and asked me to copy it down on proper paper. Then he sent it to a Chinese newspaper which had a children’s section and it was published. He gave me so much encouragement and asked me to write compositions with different titles from other students, so I wrote more. I loved it, and I learned more quickly than other students, and the habit of writing started from there.

My interview with our latest Malaysian novelist to be published overseas, Chiew-Siah Tei is in Starmag today. I loved hearing about how the encouragement of her teacher, and the kind neighbours with books helped foster her imagination at an early age.

(Incidentally, I'm working on another longer piece on Chiew-Siah for Off the Edge at the moment.)

Also in Starmag Jacqueline Pereira reviews the novel :

The tale is cohesive and compelling, the author’s voice loud and clear. The narrative style dispels any confusion that may have arisen out of the novel’s many issues — filial relationships, breaking with tradition, exploring new horizons and the advent of western influences. ... Asian audiences will easily identify with the straightforward theme, prevalent in their societies throughout the centuries. Especially those still caught in the conundrum of the relativity of identity. Another technique the author adopts is describing a place, event or scene via a list of single words or phrases. Yet the images clash staccato-style in your mind, impeding easy reading.

And by coincidence, Angela Bennie inteviews Chiew-Siah in this morning's Sydney Morning Herald.

The Kunal Basu Interview Part 2: The Japanese Wife and Other Stories

(The Kunal Basu interview continued from yesterday.)

Although Basu realises that it is impossible, as an author, to strategise for film, one of his stories is finally making the leap to the big screen. He describes as “fortuitous” a meeting with Indian film director Aparna Sen in 2006 at an Oxford dinner party. In the course of the conversation Sen said that she would love to do a love story, except that love is so boring, and everything has been written about it.

Half jokingly, Basu told her that he had a love story that was completely different, and related the story of The Japanese Wife, a short story that had been lying in his desk drawer for ten years. It describes the tender relationship between a Bengali schoolteacher and his pen-friend, a Japanese woman. The two never meet, but agree to a marriage. “It is a relationship of great intimacy,” says Basu “but no domesticity.”

As soon as Sen read the story she was determined make the film and asked Basu to write the screenplay. He turned down the offer, feeling that it would find it difficult to revisit the story with his original passion. But he has remained involved with the production and says that he is very happy indeed with what he has seen of it so far.

“It’s not Indian cinema dubbed for a diaspora audience abroad, but world cinema like Pedro Almodóvar’s films and Il Postino, which people all over the world can relate to.” The film is scheduled for general release in October. Since it seemed strange to make a film from an unpublished short story, it was clearly the right time to bring out a whole collection.

Basu has always loved writing short fiction but says that it was always an uphill struggle to persuade his publishers that they were commercially viable. He says that he would like to debunk the myth that short stories don’t sell once and for all.

“All publishers need to do is believe in their short story collections. If you start out saying I don’t believe this book will sell, then it won’t. But if you believe in it passionately, then you can convey that passion to readers.” It is a viewpoint he’s in a good position to defend with this first collection currently riding close to the top of the bestseller list in India.

Basu jokes that his stories arise from “a sort of chemical imbalance in the brain. First, he must get himself into the right state of mind, which he describes as a relaxed state of free floatation.

Writers can’t get too anxious about getting their stories down to the page: “It’s like when you’re young trying to find a girlfriend. If you’re too purposive about finding a girlfriend you’ll never meet her. But if you’re totally loose in your life, if you’re totally relaxed, then you’ll bump into her.”

Stories might be sparked by the smallest of things, a chance encounter, snatches of conversation, a small newspaper article. If he’s struck with the starting point of stories he pushes them further asking “What would happen if?”, and exploring the possibilities.

He says he writes only those that keep him awake at night. “Take for example Grateful Ganga, the second story in The Japanese Wife. I was in India and I was reading a newspaper, cup of tea in my hand, and there’s this little story about Jerry Garcia. Apparently he had two wives and one of the wives came to India with a cask of ashes to immerse them in the Ganges. The story was that when she went back, the other wife said ‘How dare you disappear with my husband’s ashes?’ and they had this fight over them.

“I wasn’t interested in that, but in the whole image of this western woman on a plane with a cask of ashes, coming to India for the first time. All she wants to do is go to the Ganges, immerse the damn thing, and go back. Except that she gets waylaid by circumstances. On the plane she meets this middle-aged pot-bellied Punjabi business man who loves the music of Kishore. So I said, that’s interesting. What if this were to happen?, What if that were to happen? He’s going to be married and that’s going to create a few problems, how does he deal with that? How’s his wife going to react? On the one hand you’ve got great Indian hospitality for a guest. Except the wife suspects that this guest is having an affair with her husband. So how would that go? It’s important for me to keep day dreaming or float. Hopefully I would have seen something that later I would have on would become a story.”

Basu continues to find inspiration in the unlikeliest of places. He describes how, on a recent trip to Beijing, once again wearing the hat of academic, he was invited to a banquet by one of his former students, now the director of a school for public health, attached to one of the biggest schools for Chinese medicine. He almost declined the invitation fearing that the evening would be boring, but civility won out. After the meal, his student told him that there was a museum of traditional Chinese medicine upstairs and asked whether he would be interested in seeing it. He was. As he walked around the two floors of exhibits that the got the idea for his next novel, about a young Portuguese doctor seeking a cure for syphilis.

He’s interested in particular with the philosophical underpinnings of the contrasting eastern and western attitudes to health. It’s this scholarly thoroughness and a willingness to deal with deeper intellectual issues that marks out Basu’s novels from most other historical fiction, and thus it comes as something as a surprise that he hasn’t yet enjoyed the commercial success his work deserves, or been nominated yet for literary prizes. But he’s quite sanguine about that.

“You cannot simple lead an authors life thinking when will the bells ring for me and when am I going to win an award?”

“We are in a domain where there are no defined measures of success and the marketing hype of books often times surpasses real appreciation. We’ve commoditized everything in life, you know, including the arts.

“ I’m much more of a traditionalist in that regard, and if my books stay on bookshelves twenty-five years after I’ve died and different people read them, then I will think that I have succeeded.”

Let's Talk About Sex

Oh, why not?

Here's a column I wrote for the now defunct Chrome Magazine way back. (No-one under 18 may read this in case they are put off sex for life!):

Why is good sex such a problem?

The writing of it, I mean. For the novelist.

Because while purveyors of porn have no qualms about depicting graphic acts of bonking in full squelching detail, the task for the serious novelist is fraught with peril: badly written sex scenes can be unintentionally hilarious and as Canadian writer Sandra Martin says “Performance anxiety can lead to overwriting in an author who is trying too hard, or limpness in a writer unable to rise above self-consciousness.”

Maybe it speaks volumes about the British tendency to treat sex as a bit of a joke anyway, but the Annual Bad Sex Awards is one of London’s most glittering literary events. The prize is given to the writer who creates the most “inept, embarrassing and unnecessary” description of the sexual act published in the a particular year and was initiated by Literary Review’s Auberon Waugh. Over the years the list of contenders has come to read like a list of Who’s Who in Fiction: John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Sebastian Faulks and even the revered Salman Rushdie have made the shortlist, showing that awful writing about sex truly knows no bounds.

Let me just give you a little taster of the kind of writing that bags the award. Novelist Nicholas Royle had a character called Yasmin “making a noise somewhere between a beached seal and a police siren” while her partner Ambrose was “punching smoothly in and out of her like a sewing machine” (The Matter of the Heart 1997); David Huggins made the grade by crafting the immortal line “Liz squeaked like wet rubber” (The Big Kiss - An Arcade Mystery 1997); while Wendy Perriam writes of one of her characters: “Weirdly, he was clad in pin-stripes at the same time as being naked. Pin stripes were erotic, the uniform of fathers, two-dimensional fathers. Even Mr. Hughes penis had a seductive pin-striped foreskin” (Tread Softly 2002)

When you’ve picked yourself up off the floor, you might like to consider the case of poor Tom Wolfe. He won last year with a scene from his latest novel I Am Charlotte:

"Slither slither slither slither went the tongue. But the hand that was what she tried to concentrate on, the hand, since it has the entire terrain of her torso to explore and not just the otorhinolaryngological caverns - oh God, it was not just at the border where the flesh of the breast joins the pectoral sheath of the chest - no, the hand was cupping her entire right - Now!"

For those not in reach of a good medical dictionary, otorhinolaryngological actually means ear, nose and throat, and like the act of snogging it depicts, the word is damned hard to get your tongue round. Not surprisingly, Wolfe was not amused by his win and did not turn up to collect the award in person, arguing that the judges had missed the irony of the piece. He hadn’t meant the scene to be at all sexy, he said. "There's nothing like a nine-syllable word to chase Eros off the premises." Quite.

Other authors have turned up to accept their embarrassing statuettes with good grace. Philip Hook who won for his second novel The Stone Breakers told a sorry tale in his acceptance speech of trying to impress a rich Frenchwoman by telling her that he had won a literary award. When she learned that the award was for bad sex, she observed dryly that there must be a great deal of competition in England for a prize like that!

If contemporary writers much feel Waugh looking disapprovingly over their shoulders as they pen a sex scene, help is at hand in the form of Elizabeth Benedict’s excellent handbook for writers: The Joy of Writing Sex. She maintains that it is the sheer ordinariness of sex which makes it so hard to write about. “It’s like describing someone eating,” she says “cutting the food, lifting it to one’s mouth. Inserting it, chewing and swallowing”. The real skill, she says, is in making the ordinary look natural and yet feel unique.

If anything, the pervasive influence of pornography seems to have put many writers off including sex scenes in their own writing. Natasha Walter writing in the Guardian suggests some of the best writers are deliberately choosing to be coy in their approach. She cites Zoë Heller’s Notes From A Scandal, a novel about a schoolteacher who has an affair with one of her students. There is of course plenty of sex in the background, but it doesn’t actually end up on the page. She says that in Brick Lane Monica Ali “gets over the antique power of adultery, with its aura of taboo” ore effectively by not touching the sex act of her adulterous character, Naznen.

But in the end, no act makes the character more vulnerable or shows the deeper dimensions of a relationship than sex in literature. When it works on the page the character’s soul and heart are as engaged in the act as body parts, and the writer’s deeper purpose is served.

Because sex in literature is always about so much more than just the sex act. Lady Chatterley’s Lover shocked many at the time of the book’s publication, but Lawrence’s aim was to show how sex has the power to spiritually unify a man and a woman. The prodigious promiscuity of Hector Castillo Oscar Hijuelos’ The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love is intended as a tribute to Cuban machismo. Alan Hollinghurst’s graphic depictions of gay sex The Line of Beauty, serve to underline his protagonist’s journey from romantic student to morally corrupt individual. The ménage a trois in Jill Paton Walsh’s dark religious fable Flight of Angels serves beautifully to illustrate her character’s philosophy that bodily joys are to be relished as much as the spiritual: it is arguably the most erotic scene in contemporary literary fiction.

Certainly, I will never look at olive oil and honey in the same way again.

(Pic nicked from Wikipedia)

Readsmonthly Rocks!

In yesterday's Readsmonthly section of Starmag, I got to pay tribute to Doris Lessing. There's also a list of suggested reads. Writing it really had me scraping round in the far corners of my brain for traces the books had left behind decades before ... and left me wanting to reread especially The Grass is Singing and Memories of a Survivor.

The shy and very talented Shahril Nizam is interviewed by Daphne Lee about his new collection of poetry and art If Only. Daphne is absolutely right about how self-effacing he is in public, but she told me that she'd found Shahril so fascinating to talk to that she had forgotten to take notes at points during the interview!

The poet/illustrator says about his work:

Drawing and writing are just ways of externalising thoughts and ideas ... But I find it hard to be direct all the time. Maybe that’s true of everyone. Sometimes we are open and sometimes secretive, even with ourselves. Sometimes, there are things we don’t truly understand or even want to admit. That doesn’t mean we can’t be honest, too. ... I find writing a poem or drawing a picture allows me to be honest without revealing too much. The imagery, symbolism and so on can mean anything. And it can mean one thing to one person and another to someone else. It can be different truths to different people.

Celebrity reviewer Tom Abang Saufi talks about Paul Theroux's The Elephanta Suite. (Tom of course is one of Malaysia's top fashion designers.)

I've read a lot of Theroux, travel writing and fiction, and very much enjoy his work. But he's so prolific that I gave up trying to keep up some time back. But I think I've just been talked into picking up this one! Especially as I love the idea of intertwined stories.

I had to nick this lovely picture of Amir Muhammad from the page listing author events happening up and down the country! Both Amir and Shahril Nizam are appearing at the Courtyard, MPH Mid Valley Megamall, on November 11th 3-4 p.m.

Sexy Grammar!

My interview from today's Star with Ronald Carter who co-wrote the Cambridge Grammar of English: A Comprehensive Guide with Michael McCarthy.

There's nothing sexy about grammar books, right? Wrong, totally wrong! This grammar describes the spoken language along the written for the first time ever and comes up with some real surprises about how the language is used.

Malaysian English an inferior variety? No, it's just as valid as British English says Carter ... and for that matter every other linguist and lexicographer (dictionary compiler) that I've ever spoken to. Read the article to see why, if you're not convinced.

I do want to talk about Malaysian English at length some time, but it's such a big topic and I have so many thoughts about it ...

Little Books with a Big Mission

My article about World Book Day and how we get to celebrate it twice in Malaysia is in StarMag today. I have to tell you that it was written in record time (for me, anyway! Had to pretend to myself I was writing a blog entry between first and second cups of tea!)

Anyway, the article allowed me to do a little bit of tub-thumping over a couple of issues close to my heart - reading campaigns and books for marginal readers.

The Quick Reads series I mention in the article is I think a very exciting innovation - short, exciting reads by top writers, which are accessible to those who might find a longer book a bit of a struggle. They are not in any sense simplified readers and there is nothing dumbed down about them. This I think is a very important point.

New titles have just been released in conjunction with World Book Day 2007 including Lily by Adele Geras, Twenty Tales from the War Zone by John Simpson, Dr Who: Made of Steel by Terrance Dicks, The Sun Book of Short Stories and the delightfully titled Reading: My Arse! a novel by Ricky Thomlinson. The series is also supported by extensive resource material.

I have seen the books in Times in Bangsar Shopping Complex, but they were just mixed in with everything else. Other bookstores seem to sadly have missed the boat. (I have, though, ordered the whole set for the British Council Library and feel they will be ideal for the language learners who use the resources there.)

I reckon that if Britain has almost a fifth of the population who are sub-literate, Malaysia is likely to have a much higher proportion. You can't simply issue a government directive and tell people that they should read books. Many people can't read books!

But perhaps they can be lead to reading books if the stepping stones are put in place for them.

The simple equation is this: if a marginal reader picks up a little book that they can finish without too much of a struggle, and has a very enjoyable reading experience, they will be looking to repeat the experience.

Anyway, it's World Book Day tomorrow, so why not buy a book for a close friend as a gift and present it with a red rose?

A Camilla Cameo

My interview with Canadian author Camilla Gibb in StarMag today:

When Camilla Gibb realised in her teens that what she really wanted to do in life was write, she found herself surrounded by people who tried to talk her out of such an impractical career choice.

Among them was her English teacher who told her, “You’re only 18. What are you going to write about? Have a life first. Go to university and study something that will teach you about the world and then if you still insist on writing, you will have so much more to bring to the page.”

Read the whole piece here.

Twan's Debut!

The Gift of Rain is in every sense a “big” book, not only substantial in size, but also in theme, and in the amount of incident that is crammed into it. It’s hard to know just how to pigeonhole this book. Literary fiction? Thriller? Historical novel? Big screen kung-fu movie with Hollywood glitz and glamour translated to the page? The novel combines elements of all of these, yet succeeds very much on its own terms ...

My interview with Tan Twan Eng gets a whole page in the first of StarMag's brand new Readsmonthly supplements. In it he talks about how his debut novel was conceived, written and researched, why he unashamedly embraces the exotic ... and a sneak preview of what he's working on next. And you can read my review of The Gift of Rain here.

So much had to be squashed into such a teensy word limit alas: I had a whole lot more I wanted to say about the book, and fascinating chunks of interview I had to cut out. (All to be used elsewhere and elsetime, have patience!)

Also in the supplement is a very interesting piece by filmmaker Ho Yuhang on the dark world of Japanese crime novelist Natsuo Kirino - I'm tempted to take advantage of the 25% off discount voucher ...

It's good to see the bookshops on board, supporting this supplement ... and all I ask for is MORE PLEASE. Not a monthly, but a weekly. Not four pages, but a whole thick pullout. But then I'm just greedy!

Malika's Manifesto

My interview with poet Malika Booker in Starmag today.

I find the lady and the story of how she set up Malika's Kitchen truly inspirational: I hope that the things she says in the article finds resonance with young writers and the not-sure -how-to-get-starteds.

Before talking to Malika I had never really considered that poetry might have politics. Well if it does, I nominated her ... Leader of the Opposition!

Her story demonstrates how writers can take matters into their own hands, form a cooperative, work at the craft together, and use spoken word events to get their poetry out. At a time when readership for poetry books is declining, she shows that it poetry doesn't belong just to an ivory-towered academic elite, or to the printed page, and can win large and enthusiastic audiences.

Her emphasis is on poetry as communication, not the clever clever obscurification which many poets go in for (an unfortunate by-product of print, she believes). Poetry was oral long before it was published, and she sees spoken word performance as poetry being returned to its roots.

She emphasises the importance of craft, the need to become better at what you do, and constantly work at your art. She's humble enough to say that everything she's done up to now has been like being in school, learning, and that it's only now that she feel she's found her voice and is ready to publish. (This despite critical acclaim of her work.)

The need for writers to collaborate, share and learn from each other comes through everything she says.

She acknowledges too her influences and her mentor. (I couldn't resist snapping this shot of Malika's hands when she showed me the books by Sharon Olds and Kwame Dawes she carries everywhere.) Poetry - no art - can exist in a vacuum.

But what inspires me most about Malika is the way she generously shares her craft with others - the poets she nurtures through The Kitchen in London, her work with inner city children and in her work overseas with British Council. I'm sure she's sown the seeds of something much bigger in Malaysia. And come to think about it, this manifesto I've drawn up for her also seems to nicely fit the politics of Project OMG! (Bless them, and may they go from strength to strength.)

Oh ... and I also love her very individual sense of style. Those bangles! That lovely beaded ring! The coloured threads woven into her hair! I've never been a fan of piercings here and there but I feel like rushing out and getting a couple of tiny diamond studs stuck in my face. (Good job I've spent all my money on books, hey?)

With a word limit of 800 words for the Starmag piece, tough choices had to be made about what to include and what to leave out. I wanted to give as much space as possible to Malika's words. I wanted her voice to come through. But I'm sad I didn't have room to talk about some of her projects in more detail. Maybe in a later post?

You might also like to read Sharanya's account of Malika's workshop.

Related Posts:

Malika at No Black Tie (23/11/06)
Malika's Poets at the Food Foundry (25/11/06)

Hands On Writer

A young man runs away from home after a harsh childhood and migrates to America in search of a better life. He eventually becomes an English teacher and finds himself telling stories of his life to his students - to entertain and inspire them. Eventually it dawns on him that perhaps he should write the stories down.

Sorry if I labour the parallels between Stephen Ling's story and Frank McCourt's in my piece published in Starmag today ... but it strikes me that in some ways their stories are so similar.

Ling's memoir For My Hands Only (reviewed in Star Two a few weeks ago) was published by a small publisher in Seattle earlier this year. When I was passed a copy just a couple of days before the interview, I realised that the book was a gem - a very evocative account of growing up poor in the Perak town of Sitiawan, and giving voice to the kind of people - impoverished and uneducated Chinese smallholders who don't feature very prominently in Malaysian history books. Ling's memoir is an important sociological document and wouldn't be too out of place among this year's crop of "misery memoirs", but it also happens to be a well-paced and entertaining read.

The book is available at the moment on Amazon and through Borders and Kinokuniya who bring in copies from the US.

This should be published here, I said, taking off my efficient interviewer hat and putting on my literary busybody one. There's such a shortage of good, locally written books, and people would want definitely to read this ...

And now the good news is that Stephen has now found a publisher here (am I allowed to say any more?) and the book will be out next year in a slightly re-edited version.

Re-edited because ... sorry to say this but Ling's first publisher really should have taken more time and trouble to get the manuscript up to standard! The proofreading isn't great, and more paragraphs in places would make the text less dense. These are simple things that any halfway decent editor should have put right for him. The white cover too lacks impact and looks more like a self-published effort. Frankly, this book deserves better.

Having made the journey home for the first time in 45 years, Stephen says that he will be back in Malaysia when the new edition comes out to publicise it.

He also has plans for further books based on his very colourful life - he certainly has plenty of material, judging by the stream of very entertaining anecdotes that emerge that evening. (His account of his journey to America by cargo ship is hilarious and I do hope it gets written.)

I really do wish him luck and hope that it isn't too long before the book is widely read in this part of the world. As it deserves to be.

Always an Outsider

My article on Anita Desai in Starmag today. Here's my original version of the piece. (The printed article got skewed Kiran-wards for obvious reasons! But I'm not at all unhappy with the rearrangement.)

“I see India with my mother’s eyes – as an outsider, but with my father’s heart.”

Novelist Anita Desai explains to her audience at the Ubud Readers’ and Writers’ Festival in Bali, that being an outsider has always felt perfectly normal to her. Although nearing seventy, Desai has a serene beauty about her, and speaks in a soft, carefully modulated voice.

Desai was born in Mussorie, a hill station north of Delhi, yet her father was a Bengali business man who had met her German mother when he went to study in Berlin, just ahead of the Hitler period. Neither of her parents revisited their original homes: the country her mother knew had been destroyed, and she did not want to see the new Germany.

The novelist grew up between cultures but it wasn’t until she went to school that she began to see herself as different from other children.

She says that her mother made a huge effort to bring her up as an Indian, but German was the language at home. She remembers her singing German lieder, and baking German kuchen, as well as cooking Bengali food. Her mother was also a great storyteller and fired the young Anita’s imagination with highly embellished stories from Hans Anderson and Grimm’s fairy tales.

Desai started writing aged six, and had her first work published at nine when a little piece she had written was chosen for a magazine. From the beginning she wrote in English, which she claims has always given her writing a sense of separation from other parts of her life. “I am most myself when I write,” she adds “In social life you are always adapting. But when writing, here you can tell the truth.”

When she began writing, she says, only a handful of writers scattered throughout India were writing in English. “It is a challenge to inherit a language which is not your own,” she says “you need to internalize it and recreate it.”

At the same time though, most Indian writers looked down on the language. “We believed ours would be the last generation to use it.” But when Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children “came like a thunderbolt”, she says, it gave later generations the courage to use English as an Indian language.

Married in 1958 to a businessman, Desai raised four children while continuing to write. Her first novel The Peacock was published in 1963, and was followed by fourteen more, including works for children. She reached the Booker shortlist three times: Clear Light of Day (1980), In Custody (1984), and Fasting, Feasting (1999).

Desai usually waited to write until her four children were out of the house because she felt that it would be distressing for them to see that her mind was elsewhere than on family life.

“When the inevitable happened and copies of a book arrived from the publisher, the children would tiptoe past it. It took until they were adults before they could face the fact that I had a separate life.”

She says that she has felt especially close to Kiran since her daughter started writing. “I can talk about things to her that I can’t talk about to the others,” she confides. The two of them share a house in upstate New York. Kiran writes upstairs, she writes downstairs and they tend to meet in the kitchen and they tend to meet up in the kitchen when they’re hungry.

When Desai moved to the West, first of all to take up and a take up a post of Cambridge University and later to New York, Kiran was only 15. Desai says that now she has very conflicted feelings about the move and the emotional impact of it on her daughter.

“One has to spend one’s childhood in one’s own country,” she says wistfully. But it is clearly the experience of living between cultures, and the challenge defining an identity as an immigrant which has given Kiran Desai the subject matter for her novel, The Inheritance of Loss, which this week won the ultimate literary prize, the £50,000 Booker Prize an award which for so long eluded her mother. It should come as no surprise though that the novel is dedicated to Anita.

Also in Starmag today, reviews of Booker shortlisted novels Hisham Matar's In the Country of Men reviewed by Tee Shiao Ee, and Kate Grenville's The Secret River reviewed by Tan Shiow Chin.

Perfectly Bowled

My article about Romesh Gunasekera in Starmag today. It's a blend of interview and review. But it definitely suffers from the word limit which is unavoidable with so little space for reviews, but extremely frustrating when the book is as complex and multi-layered as The Match, and you are bursting to say so much more about characters and themes and the writing. Difficult too just to cut out chunks of a conversation with a fascinating writer and reduce them to soundbites.

“Identity is never a one dimensional thing,” says author Romesh Gunasekera, neatly sidestepping my question about whether he sees himself as a British or a Sri Lankan writer. His novels and short stories are set in both places and he clearly relishes the ability to move between worlds without being pigeonholed himself.

His first novel Reef, a lyrical story about memory and imagination, put Gunasekera firmly on the international literary map. The novel was nominated for the 1994 Booker prize, and whilst he says it was wonderful to be shortlisted, he claims that it was “kind of ideal not to have won it because the one or two first time writers who did win it with the first book tended not to have written after that.”

At under 200 pages, Reef is an unusually short novel in an age where fiction writers seem obliged to turn out complex and lengthy tomes. Says Gunasekera with characteristic humility “I didn’t think I had the right to demand someone read a long novel by a writer they didn’t know.”

It is impossible of course to write about Sri Lanka without reference to the atrocities which have been part of its recent troubled history. I ask him whether he felt he had a duty as a writer to make sense of the violence.

“I’m not writing to an agenda, but writing stories that interest me,” he says. “But I also have to write to understand the world I live in and the fact that the world is getting more violent.”

In his earlier works that violence tends to occur outside of the frame of the story, but with its effect and reverberations being felt by the characters in the foreground. It’s his third novel Heaven’s Edge, set in a dystopian fictional country, which deals with the subject more directly. It “explores the whole idea of violence, how it comes into our lives and how man has to come to terms with it.”

Gunasekera says he always has ideas for the next novel are germinating even as he writes current one. “I already know the books I intend to write if I live long enough”, he says. But he finds it hard to talk about the process that he goes through when writing fiction because it’s been different for each book.

“One thing I’ve learned is I don’t know how to do it. I do know roughly how long it’ll take me which is longer than I think. I have a rough idea of how much of my life will go into it. Otherwise when you start any book you are always a novice.

“If you write the kind of books I tend to write which don’t conform to a genre, you start with nothing and you have to invent the way to do it each time. People always talk about giving birth to novels, and I think that there is a similarity. Afterwards you tend to forget what’s involved, how difficult, frustrating and painful it is.”


It’s vitally important for him that the book feels alive for his readers and totally engages them. The key to making this happen is a great deal of revision.

“Unless you are making a Jackson Pollock which is fine in terms of self-expression, creating different worlds does involve rewriting. I’d happily continue rewriting for many more years except that some time it must come to an end.”

Gunasekera’s first book Monkfish Moon established his credentials as a writer of short fiction at a time when it was relatively rare for writers to bring out a collection as a first book, and although he says that he would love to bring out another, it not be commercially viable.

Indeed, the short story has been declared so seriously endangered in Britain that a campaign to save it from extinction has been instigated. But Gunasekera sees the tide beginning to turn with the awarding of an annual short story prize, and with the growth of e-zines and the increasing popularity of the short-short story. He firmly believes the short story is still the best form for the beginning writer to tackle.

I tell him that I read that he’d once warned that fiction can be dangerous because it “opens up things that probably shouldn’t be opened up” and ask him what he meant by that. It’s a theme he warms to.

“Literature should be subversive. When you read a book, you become the story. You can imagine it exactly how you like and no-one can tell you you’re right or wrong. External authority has no place - and this is why in a repressive regime fiction is banned and fiction writers are persecuted.”

And probably the most powerful argument for our need to read good books!

What I'd have added if the word-limit was unlimited and my editor had put up with self-indulgent meanderings:

Romesh (in my blog we're on first name terms!) writes about a character who lives between countries and between cultures, and who adopts a home for himself and puts down roots.

I can identify with the sense of dislocation that Sunny experiences, since I'm someone who has moved from one part of the globe to another (UK to here, and a couple of years in Africa in between.) You don't quite belong, either in the place you came from originally - although it represents your roots, and you don't quite belong in your adopted country. You constantly struggle to define who you are.

I know many Malaysians who feel like this. Their roots are in India, China, Indonesia, Pakistan. Their work or student days have taken them overseas, often to Western countries. Some of them emigrate to other countries for a spell or for good, looking for better lives for themselves.

These children of a wider world some unkindly call "bananas" (yellow outside, white inside) when they come home. But skin colour has nothing to do with the colour of the inner self. (If they are bananas, I'm a cheese-sandwich.)

We also absorb cultures through the books we read, the films we watch, the places we travel in our heads. And we decide to deliberately adopt cultures ... and one way of doing this is our choice of sports teams (which neatly brings us back to one of the main themes of the book!)

As Romesh said to me in the earlier interview: "I don't understand what people mean by culture." The more you think about it, the more slippery the concept gets, and the more meaningless terms like "nationality" and "patriotism" become.

I like this slipperiness. I like moving between cultures. But sometimes it can feel lonely too. (What say you?) Romesh captures this feeling so well in the book.

Romesh refuses to call himself a British or a Sri Lankan writer. The first time I interviewed him I was a bit miffed that he was being so unpindownable. After reading The Match, I fully understand.

What else? One thing that struck me reading the book is that Sunny is just so bloody ... ordinary! Heck, my life is more interesting than Sunny's (and that's not saying a lot)! There are times when I want to shake him up and shout in his ear to get a grip on his life, especially when his marriage begins to go down the tubes and he starts to slide into alchoholism. But how well I understand the sense of not being able to communicate what you want to say to someone you love because words are inadedequate. Sunny is so real! A cross-cultural everyman.

Romesh doesn't budge an inch from his viewpoint throught the novel, which gives the novel an intimacy ... and a great honesty. And the writing is of course, beautiful, with the kind of polish that can only come from painstaking revision.

Could wax on and on. But most of you have gone to sleep by now, so I'll stop here.

Would I recommend The Match? Definitely for those who love literary fiction, are fascinated by excellent craftsmanship. Definitely not for those requiring a thrill-a-minute, pacy read!

Hari Interview

My article on Hari Kunzru in today's StarMag

Struggling with identity?

Award-winning author and all round Renaissance man Hari Kunzru was in the country on Tuesday and shared his thoughts on writing and how he stared at a cursor for a month with SHARON BAKAR.

A sense of dislocation makes for good art, says Hari Kunzru.
I’D read enough of Hari Kunzru’s journalism to know that he is something of a polymath with an interest in everything from literature, art and music to philosophy, technology and politics.

His reputation for being an extremely “cool dude” had also preceded him: besides being one of Britain’s hottest young novelists, he’s written for some of the trendiest magazines (Wired, Wallpaper), spins vinyl as a DJ, and apparently knows how to mix a mean martini cocktail.

For all that, Kunzru is remarkably down-to-earth and approachable, as I discovered when he was in Kuala Lumpur last week on a visit sponsored by the British Council.

Kunzru grew up in predominately white, suburban Essex, the son of a Kashmiri doctor and English mother who met while working in the same hospital. “Not quite belonging is a good position to make art from,” he says.

Indeed, Kunzru’s struggle with the question of identity explains the sense of dislocation that lies at the heart of his fiction.

Set in India, Britain and West Africa, Kunzru’s sprawling first novel, The Impressionist sets out to explore the whole question of the uncertainty of selfhood. It’s an end-of-empire reversal of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, says Kunzru, with “all the furniture of a typical Raj novel, but it uses it to interrogate all the assumptions people have about what an Indian novel ought to be.”

Kunzru describes The Impressionist as “a kind of doughnut novel”, with his central character, Pran, as the hole in the middle. Pran is quite deliberately given no interior life whatsoever, and slips in and out of different identities as he is propelled forward by the forces of history.

The novel won a couple of major literary awards and was short listed for several more, which no doubt had Kunzru and his publishers sighing with relief after the whopping advance he’d received for a two-novel deal.

But Kunzru initially felt blocked by the expectations heaped on him when he began writing Transmission.

“It took me about a month of staring at the cursor to really be able to start it,” he says “but then I started to enjoy myself and wrote quickly after that.”

The novel explores the impact of globalisation and weaves together the stories of Arjun, an Indian cybercoolie who releases a malicious computer virus on the world, a jet-setting marketing executive, and a desperately unhappy Bollywood star shooting her next musical in a castle in Scotland.

Kunzru said that the writing of the book began with several disparate images (someone washed up on a beach, a lonely figure walking down a road) and then trying to make sense of them and seeing how they could be brought together in a story.

The characters also grew from places that Kunzru visited, including a £10mil (RM67mil) penthouse by the River Thames, “the most exposed and least domestic living environment I could imagine”. He gave Arjun a family background very similar to one of his cousins who is in middle management for a software solutions company in New Delhi, and used a new city zone on the opposite side of the river as the setting for the early scenes of the novel.

Kunzru’s novels are richly detailed and littered with many a clever turn of phrase. He says he produces “not very many drafts”, but works them over meticulously until satisfied, taking pleasure in “the music of a good sentence”. He appreciates the craft of other writers, often picking apart a passage to see how the author has achieved a certain effect. He says that he particularly enjoys Sybil Bedford, E.L. Doctorow and the measuredness of the later Philip Roth.

Kunzru, like many writers of his generation, acknowledges a debt to Salman Rushdie and admits, “The Impressionist couldn’t have been written before Midnight’s Children.” And he credits author Hanif Kureishi with opening up “a huge cultural possibility” with his novel The Buddha of Suburbia.

Noise is a compilation of surprisingly dark short stories exploring the implications of an increasingly wired world. “I enjoy opening up a little world that works according to its own logic,” Kunzru says, adding that he hopes to write more short stories after the publication of his third novel next May.

The first draft has now been completed, and Kunzru believes it to be “far and away” superior to his previous work.

“It hasn’t a thing to do with India, race or technology, but is about commitment,” he says. “It’s about a young man who drifts into extreme leftist radicalism in Britain in the early 1970s and becomes involved in direct action, and ultimately in bombings of property.

“The book is framed by narrative taking place in the late 1990s. It’s about what it’s like to be 21 and believe in your own rightness, and then what it’s like to be 50 years old and to not have the luxury of certainty anymore.”

Kunzru finds himself increasingly being asked to speak with a political hat on. As a spokesman for British PEN, the world’s oldest human rights organisation, he recently drew the ire of the Maldives Government when he wrote a newspaper piece urging tourists to boycott the islands because of government complicity in torture, imprisonment and disappearances.

And he famously turned down Mail on Sunday’s John Llewellyn Rees Award because of the paper’s “hostility towards black and Asian writers” and insisted that the £5,000 (RM33,500) prize money should be donated instead to the Refugee Council (a British non-governmental organisation that provides advice and assistance to asylum seekers).

Concern for the underdog and the disenfranchised clearly informs more than just Kunzru’s novels.

Poetry from Pain

My article on Francesca Beard is in Starmag yesterday.

How she began performing her work:

Although she wrote poetry for years, she didn’t consider performing it until, after being dumped very painfully by a boyfriend, she lugged her badly bruised ego along to an open mike session where she felt no one would know her. She describes her first experience of standing in front of an audience as being like a bungee jump. But fear took away the heartbreak, and performing her work for an audience quickly became addictive. “When people say that creative writing is a form of therapy, it really was for me.” The anger she felt towards her boyfriend was channelled into a powerful poem called Length of String, which she included in her collection of poems, Cheap, a cyclostyled chapbook that she sells at gigs.

Pain and anger and a desire for revenge on those who cause us greatest hurt can be a terrific boost to creativity! Just sharpen up those knives!

Kitty Kaye has written a very good piece about Francesca, while Ridzwan A. Rahim has penned a very good introduction to peformance poetry for "the opposition"!

I like Ridzwan's suggestion that:

In Malaysia, the closest that we have to performance poetry is perhaps pantun, which is really a battle between poets where the audience is also highly involved.

I agree. I love pantuns and think so much more could be done with them - particularly in performance ...

The Dina Zaman File

Dina Zaman suggested the idea of a blog interview the other day to tie in with her reading this afternoon at Borders. Since we'd arranged to meet yesterday morning to talk over a couple of her stories, it seemed like the right opportunity.

After all, if as Raman suggests, the local newspapers aren't featuring much book news, doesn't a self-styled litblogger have a duty to scoop an exclusive?

I've enjoyed Dina's writing for some time. The first stories I came across were published in a little volume called Night & Day (Rhino Press) and I felt rush of joy as I read them. Not only did the writing slip down easily, she was the first writer I'd come across who'd manged to get down to the page a Malaysia I recognised. (Heck, She even captured characters I had seen myself on the street!)

Dina told me that she had spent hours observing people while waiting for her bus after work (she was a PR executive for Central Market or wandering Petaling Street. The stories were there and waiting for her.

Dina says that she's always felt a sense of rootlessness, of being in the outside of things. Her father was a diplomat and the family had to continually move between postings so that she always felt like the new kid in town.

Born in 1969, she spent her early years in Tokyo and grew up speaking Japanese with "just a smattering of English, so that no-one knew what to do with me". One of her strongest memories from these early years was her mum making her a pair of wings because she fancied being a butterfly. The family later moved to the former Soviet Union where she attended an Indonesian school and has vivid memories of being bullied.

Because of the disruptions to her education, Dina moved back to live with her grandparents in rural Terrenganu and fell in love with kampong life. She was also homeschooled for a while - an experiment she describes as not being too successful, before the prestigious Sekolah Tungku Kurshiah and then Convent Bukit Nanas.

She discovered that writing was her vocation whilst on a degree course in Mass Communication at Western Michigan University. Forced to find a subsidiary subject, she chose creative writing initially because it seemed an easy option, but she found she had a flair for it, and Philippa, one of the pieces she wrote while there, found its way into Skoob Pacifica Anthology Volume 2 (1994) published by Thor Kah Hoong of Skoob Books.

A spell in PR followed, but Dina began to submit pieces to the New Straits Times, and before long she was offered her own column by editors Rose Ismail and Fatimah Abu Bakar. Christened Dina's Dalca (named after a kind of lentil curry which contains a whole mixture of ingredients), she soon had a large number of followers intrigued by the frankness of the writing, delighted by the humour. She also had pieces accepted by Men's Review where she describes editors Kam Raslan and Sheryl Stoddard as supportive "but tough".

She runs through the names which were most prominent in the writing scene in the early '90's, a time when the writing scene seemed so much more exciting, ("There were so few of us in the KL writing scene in those days, so we all knew each other and were working towards a common goal") but laments that of all those promising young voices only Bernice Chauly and Jit Murad are still writing.

Dina's blog The Gongkapas Times (written she says "to let off steam") carried on from where Dalca left off, and was one of the most popular destinations in the Malaysian blogosphere. There was a collective howl of sorrow when the blog suddenly got taken down by a hacker and months of entries were completely lost. (The good news though, is that it's back.)

She did an MA in Creative Writing in Lancaster, choosing it over SOAS because of London prices and a desire to be in the countryside and "live out farm girl fantasies". And there was the Lake District close at hand of course, with its writerly associations with Beatrice Potter and William Wordsworth.

She says that she didn't really feel stretched by the course where she felt she was repeating stuff she had done for her first degree. But homesicknesses was assuaged by writing about kampong life, and she finished the draft of a collection of short stories set in rural Malaysia. One of the stories, And She Became an Angel, was shortlisted for the Ian St. James Awards. (The collection The Road to Elvis and Other Stories will be published later this year.)

Her year in Britain also gave Dina the opportunity to travel around Britain and talk to fellow Muslims, and the idea for a new column about Islam was formed.

After a spell working for Marie Claire, she became editor of Rentakini, the magazine section of the controversial online newspaper, Malaysiakini. Her I Am Muslim column was born and Dina became a powerful female voice for moderate Islam in the country.

If Dina has become something of a public figure, she is at heart is a very private person who feels uneasy when her personal space is invaded. Her writing has attracted legions of fans, including some who don't respect her boundaries. "When you're very open and write about your life, people feel they know you."

She's also had her fair share of detractors over the years, she says, including those who ask "What is this Malay girl trying to prove?" and her early fiction has been criticised for being "too sexual, too angry". There's less anger, a great deal more humour in the new collection, but the stories are still bound to stir some controversy.

And once The Road to Elvis is Published? Dina's colourful stories about the larger than life characters in her extended family can keep me enthralled for hours, and I'd love to see her write a dynastic novel about her Terengganu roots ala Allende or Marquez.

Curiosity stirred? Well then, come over and hear her read some of her writing this afternoon at Borders! The fun begins at 3 p.m.

Articles of Faith

Had forgotten all about my article in Quill until I happened to see lots of freebie copies on a rack outside MPH. It's the third article in a series about creative writing and talks about fastwriting and gives a whole lot of writing prompts to get a beginner writer started.

Currently on the newstands too is chrome and my article about men not reading books by women, and I've included quotes from my drop-by-the-blog friends, Amir and Greenbottle.

Love to see my articles out there all artistically laid out ... but the one thing that spoils the pleasure is that there's always the next article sitting on my hard drive, refusing to be shaped into anything decent and always always the scary editor ...

Sorry Marisa. Sorry Gim Ean. Sorry Renee. Sorry Ruhayat. Sorry Raman. Sorry Dina.

Perhaps another article for you soon, Pang, now that I've received the check for the last one.

Have Pen - Will Subvert

My article in Starmag today:

Romesh Gunasekera doesn’t believe in pigeon-holing, nor does he write to an agenda.

IDENTITY is never a one dimensional thing,” says author Romesh Gunasekera, neatly sidestepping my question about whether he sees himself as a British or a Sri Lankan writer. His novels and short stories are set in both places and he clearly relishes the ability to move between worlds without being pigeonholed himself.

(British Council Malaysia brought the writer to Malaysia recently; he gave a reading from a selection of his works at the Silverfish bookshop in Kuala Lumpur.)

His second novel, Reef, a lyrical story about memory and imagination, put Gunasekera firmly on the international literary map. The novel was nominated for the 1994 Booker prize, and while he says it was wonderful that it was shortlisted, he claims that it was “kind of ideal not to have won because the one or two first time writers who did win with the first book tended not to have written after that.”

At fewer than 200 pages, Reef is an unusually short novel in an age where fiction writers seem obliged to turn out complex and lengthy tomes. Says Gunasekera with characteristic humility, “I didn’t think I had the right to demand someone read a long novel by a writer they didn’t know.”

It is impossible of course to write about Sri Lanka without reference to the atrocities that have been part of its recent troubled history. I ask him whether he felt he had a duty as a writer to make sense of the violence.

“I’m not writing to an agenda, but writing stories that interest me,” he says. “But I also have to write to understand the world I live in and the fact that the world is getting more violent.”

In his earlier works, that violence tends to occur outside of the frame of the story, but its effect and reverberations are felt by the characters in the foreground. It’s his third novel, Heaven’s Edge, set in a dystopian fictional country, which deals with the subject more directly. It “explores the whole idea of violence, how it comes into our lives and how man has to come to terms with it”.

Gunasekera says ideas for the next novel are germinating even as he writes the current one. “I already know the books I intend to write if I live long enough,” he says. But he finds it hard to talk about the process that he goes through when writing fiction because it’s been different for each book.

“One thing I’ve learned is I don’t know how to do it. I do know roughly how long it’ll take me, which is longer than I think. I have a rough idea of how much of my life will go into it. Otherwise, when you start any book you are always a novice.

“If you write the kind of books I tend to write, which don’t conform to a genre, you start with nothing and you have to invent the way to do it each time. People always talk about giving birth to novels, and I think that there is a similarity. Afterwards you tend to forget what’s involved, how difficult, frustrating and painful it is.”

It’s vitally important for him that the book feels alive to his readers and totally engages them. The key to making this happen is a great deal of revision.

“Unless you are making a Jackson Pollock (the American abstract artist famous for his ‘drip and splash style’), which is fine in terms of self-expression, creating different worlds does involve rewriting. I’d happily continue rewriting for many more years except that some time it must come to an end.”

Gunasekera’s first book, Monkfish Moon, established his credentials as a writer of short fiction at a time when it was relatively rare for writers to bring out a collection as a first book, and although he says that he would love to bring out another, it not be commercially viable.

Indeed, the short story has been declared so seriously endangered in Britain that a campaign to save it from extinction has been instigated. But Gunasekera sees the tide beginning to turn with the awarding of an annual short story prize, and with the growth of e-zines (online magazines) and the increasing popularity of the short-short story. He firmly believes the short story is still the best form for the novice writer to tackle.

I tell him that I read that he’d once warned that fiction can be dangerous because it “opens up things that probably shouldn’t be opened up” and ask him what he meant by that. It’s a theme he warms to.

“Literature should be subversive. When you read a book, you become the story. You can imagine it exactly how you like and no one can tell you you’re right or wrong. External authority has no place – and this is why in a repressive regime fiction is banned and fiction writers are persecuted.”

And that is probably the most powerful argument for our need to read good books!

Can-do Canfield in a Chicken Soup Can

My interview with Jack Canfield - the Chicken Soup for The Soul guy in the Star today.

(Before you go and read it, I must point out the big fat grammatical blooper in the very first sentence. This isn't what I wrote - somehow the modal verb got switched, and I come out looking as if I've forgotten how to speak my mother-tongue. I am in deeper pain than you can imagine ....)

Okay, now you can read it:

“People would always like things they don’t have. It’s human nature to want a better life” says best-selling author Jack Canfield, and Americas leading expert in Peak Performance.

It is as founder and co-creator (with Mark Victor Hansen) of the best selling Chicken Soup for Soul series (which sold more than 80 million copies sold worldwide) that Canfield is surely best known. These days there seems to be a chicken soup book catering to every sector of the market and new ones are constantly in preparation. Indeed, the public is invited to send in stories for the series and book ideas and submission guidelines are given on the website http://www.chickensoup.com/.

We might even see Chicken Soup for the Malaysian Soul one day since Canfield says that he’d be happy to entertain the idea: “if there’s editor is prepared to step forward and take charge of the project.”

Canfield attributes the success of the series to the fact that “Every story inspires and opens the reader’s heart and that they walk away feeling hopeful. The books talk about love, self-esteem, overcoming obstacles. These are all they are universal principles.”

Canfield’s latest book, co-authored with Janet Switzer, The Success Principles: How To Get From Where You Are To Where You Want To Be, is based on 64 “timeless principles” which provide a roadmap for personal success in all areas of life.

He acknowledges that there have been some excellent motivational books on the market in the past, and reels off the name of several including books by Stephen R. Covey and Napoleon Hill. “But each one gave only part of the answer. It’s like providing combinations to a combination lock: if you only know some of the numbers, it is not going to open.”

Instead, Canfield aims with this book to give his readers all the answers they need in one place, combining the wisdom of the great self-help gurus with insights his from own learning over the years (in areas as diverse as quantum physics and neuroscience), to create what he sees as being “a success bible containing everything: a sort of one stop shopping for success!”. The result is surely the most comprehensive self-help manual yet: a book both to dip into for specific advice, and one that you might just want to read from cover to cover for a total life make-over.

Canfield has been coming to South-east Asia for the past twenty years and says he sees Malaysians as becoming increasingly aspirational. On October 4th, he will be in Kuala Lumpur again to run a seminar on The Success Principles in which he will cover the most important principles in his book in depth.

He will also be running the same programme for young people a day earlier. Canfield, who is also a committed educator and an ex-teacher, says young people need to apply exactly the same principles to their lives as adults, starting with the most important one, that you must take 100% responsibility for your life.

Many children fail, Canfield says, because schools fail to teach them to be successful and parents are too often poor role models. Success is both learnable and teachable and it is not difficult to find space in the school timetable to teach the principles – as small an investment as 25 minutes a day during the home-room period has been seen to yield remarkable results including fewer reports grade to the principals office, better grade scores and enhanced athletic achievement.

A message that educators here could do well to take to heart!

I never used to be into self-help books of the kind that my friend Raman calls "just- add-water-books".

I think there's an in-built British resistance to the very idea that we might need advice. It seemed kinda sad to need someone else to tell us where we're going wrong with our lives. An admission of failure.

We associate all that bright, sparkly can-doness with Americans who distilled it from the pioneering-frontier-conquering spirit that made their nation great. It seems somehow ... alien to the British psyche. I think we'd rather embrace our imperfections lovingly and have a good laugh about them.

But I like Canfield's latest book (co-authored with Janet Switzer)The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You are to Where You Want to Be, very much and I'm enjoying improving myself principle by principle through my daily readings. (I've actually chosen the book as my bathroom reading for this month - in other words my "bog book".) I will soon be so perfect that you won't know me.

It was fun chatting to Canfield on the phone the other day. I let slip that I had sobbed my way through Chicken Soup for the Pet Lover's Soul (all those dying puppies and injured kittens and cuddly cuteness spilling from the pages ... though, come to think of it, no mention of hairballs on the sofa, masticated mice on the carpet and pools of pussy pee in the dish-draining rack as a form of odiferous protest when things aren't going their way ...).

Perhaps I should write my own self-help book one day and sell my own philosophies of life.

Think I'm going to call it:

Rat Soup for the Cynic's Soul