Category: Books, essays and others

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Books, essays and others

[3006] Reading Shih-Li Kow’s The Sum of Our Follies and being transported to Kuala Kangsar

I am generally attracted to paragraphs describing places. These descriptors make me feels a little bit like taking a vacation mentally.

George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia is primarily about the Spanish Civil War, but its pages are filled with place descriptors that I now would like to visit. Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast is set in Paris during the inter bellum period and that gives me an idea how the city looked like long ago, which I could compare to my own experience of visiting the city when I was younger.

I love Kaouther Adimi’s A Bookshop in Algiers and Alice Zeniter’s The Art of Losing incredibly for their depiction of Algiers specifically, and Algeria more generally. It has been some time since I have finished reading The Art of Losing, but a scene from the book where Algiers is observed by the protagonist from the sea still lingers in my head. I have never been to Algiers but that is now my primary idea of the city: a city of whitewashed buildings with a casbah on top of a hill, unmissable from the Mediterranean.

I think that (the feeling of taking a vacation) is the reason I enjoyed reading Shih-Li Kow’s The Sum of Our Follies. When the place Lubok Sayong first came up in the novel, I immediately searched for it online and on the map. Nothing came up, which immediately told me it is a fictional place.

Yet, some aspects of the place feel familiar. It could have been just the village of Sayong, across the Perak River from Kuala Kangsar. The suspicion only grew stronger as I went deeper into the story, which pulls in events of the 2000s into its narrative: the character YB Datuk Seri Minister most definitely satirizes Rafidah Aziz, who was a long-time Member of Parliament for Kuala Kangsar. The Sum of Our Follies was first published in 2014.

Kuala Kangsar itself plays a central role in setting the story’s background. Having lived in the town for a few years as a teenager and having visited the place several times after although not recently, the story’s progression sometimes was accompanied by vivid images in my head. It was almost as if the characters were living in a set projected out of my memory of the place. The vividness is almost as if I was watching TV.

Or it was as if I was there observing the characters personally. Away, somewhere, in Kuala Kangsar.

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Books, essays and others Conflict & disaster History & heritage Politics & government

[3005] Reading Revolutionary Iran, or an appreciation for glossary

My readings could be driven by current affairs. That was the reason I picked up Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. And that was the reason I recently read Michael Axworthy’s Revolutionary Iran: the Twelve-Day War between Iran and Israel had just concluded. These books always remind us that there is almost always a long history behind contemporary events. Things very rarely just happened on a day.

Revolutionary Iran, first published in 2013, focuses on the 1979 Iranian Revolution. But it also covers a hundred years’ worth of history, starting from the early 20th century (with the fall of Qajar Iran and the rise of the Pahlavi dynasty) up to the controversial 2011 Iranian presidential election. The long sweep of history is written up all with the aim of setting the revolution in its proper context.

As with any kind of similar books (such as much thicker and expansive The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya), the breadth and depth of the discussion are a challenge to casual readers equipped with only general knowledge of the country: there are just too many names, too many years and too many events to remember and make relevant to the whole exercise. These names and events are all interrelated, making reading Revolutionary Iran complicated. One could get lost along the way. That could cause frustration and eventually DNF: ‘did not finish’. The phone is always ready to dumb us down with social media, ever jealous of any of us perusing long-form materials.

The complexity reminds me just how useful a glossary and an index could be. It kept the story in my head straight while going through the pages of Revolutionary Iran.

Referring the glossary and the index could be a pain. Flipping pages back and forth is disruptive to reading flow. It is almost like reading while consulting a dictionary or an encyclopedia at the same time. It almost feels like reading Wikipedia with all of its hyperlinks could have been a more enjoyable endeavor.

But reading Wikipedia has its own pitfalls. Those hyperlinks are rabbit holes to be explored. With an undisciplined mind, one could easily end up reading about Kurdish nationalism or the history of Azerbaijan all of which may have some relevance to the events of 1979, but does not assist us in understanding the nuances of the Iranian revolution any better. Wikipedia’s hyperlinks could provide context, but an overload of information could also drown out of the context. Some who wander are lost.

So, a book, unlike Wikipedia, is a guided tour. It keeps the fluff out by focusing and contextualising the essentials. It is the model-building tool. And the glossary and the index, often forgotten, are little manuals useful if the reader needs help along the way.

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Books, essays and others Society

[3003] Reading Gertrude Stein’s Paris France

I am conflicted about Gertrude Stein’s Paris France. There are some great observations in there but the writing style and most of all, the essentializing of a society are something that do not sit comfortably with me.

Stein typed up her stream of consciousness casually with little regards to punctuation. Stein appears not believing in commas no she does not believe in it although sometimes she does, and she does not believe in question mark or quotation marks or full stop as she goes on to stress the same point multiple times although there are times some points are unstressed but I could imagine easily a friend of hers would have asked but don’t you believe in structure to which she would reply but structure is structure is structure like how a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.

When the back cover of the book claims Paris France is the perfect introduction to her work oh boy I said in my head what an introduction it is with long sentences where nobody is permitted to take a real or imaginary breath so much so that the readers run the risk of asphyxiation for focusing too long on a sentence that runs for what ought to be an impossible length measuring longer than the tail of a long cat or a long dog’s or a long cat’s or a long dog’s or am I suffering from dementia but I would not know but would I know but perhaps I am just frustrated with the writing style.

At times, the style of writing makes reading the book feels like reliving somebody’s fever dream as an anecdote flows into another anecdote before another anecdote takes over the narrative.

Style asides, the essentializing of the French especially of the 1900s-1930s (the book was published in 1940) offers too much generalization. Generalization of money, of luxuries, of logic, of family, of tradition and of fashion.

That got me thinking, how does one write about a society without a hint of essentialization? Maybe essentializing is a big word that I should avoid and that I should not equate it with term generalization with ease. But to write about a society without generalizing to some extent is a tall order. I thought that was something I struggled while writing The End of the Nineteen-Nineties: some form of generalization (if not essentializing) had to be made before any coherent critique could be offered in return.

Or am I too afflicted with apophenia?

Maybe. Yet a society is clearly different from one another and that differences point towards some form of way of life that is true for a particular society but not the other. What is to be written critically of a society when everything is atomized anarchically?

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Books, essays and others Conflict & disaster Politics & government

[3002] Reading George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia or… “Nak PN ke?”

I suppose if we are intent on finding similarities between two events however different they are, we would find it one way or another. Some of us are wired to find patterns or connections, even where none exists. A cat in the clouds that sort of things. Apophenia.

I kept telling myself that while reading George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia recently. However I tried adjusting down my pattern-finding bias, my mind kept on returning to contemporary Malaysian politics each time Orwell describes the republican politics of the late 1930s Spanish Civil War. As I opened Wikipedia to understand the war through a wider lens, I thought, indeed, there was a lesson, or two, from Spain for Malaysia.By Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved.

The differences between the 1920s/1930s Spain and the 2010/2020s Malaysia are aplenty. Spain experienced multiple military coups during those decades that makes Thailand a more appropriate comparison instead of Malaysia. And the Spanish conflict was bloodier than what Malaysia underwent in the 2010s and 2020s: our currently political conflicts are more boring when compared to the Spanish passion of the interwar period.

But if the Spanish Civil war was to be stripped of its details and the conflict made general, there are parallels to the today’s Malaysian reality. And the parallel is this: by the 1920s, support for the traditional powers—that is the monarchy along with the religious Christian class—was in rapid decline (within Malaysian context, throughout the 2000s and the 2010s, traditional power holders in the form of Umno suffered sustained severe erosion of support). So much so that by 1931, the king fled country over rising republican influence. Soon, the Second Spanish Republic was established (again here within Malaysian context, that runs parallel to the election of Pakatan Harapan as the federal government in 2018).

The Republic went through some difficulties right from the beginning. The traditionalists were feeling the heat of radical reforms. Land redistribution and restrictions imposed on the Church from owning properties were proceeding rapidly and pushing the traditionalists out of power further. Meanwhile, weak official responses to certain events that favored the traditionalists left republican supporters thinking the government was betraying them. All this took place with the Great Depression happening in the background. Times were just tough for almost everybody. This feels all too familiar for the 2020 Malaysia.

For the 1930s Spain, the political tensions eventually boxed everybody into an armed conflict. One on side was the republican government supported by the communists, the anarchists and the liberals, who are largely urban dwellers supported by the Soviet Union and Mexico. On the other side were the nationalist rebels comprising the monarchists, Christian conservatives and a group of fascists. By and large, the nationalists were rural folks backed by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

Of interest is here the divisions within the republican ranks, which is one of two main subjects of Homage to Catalonia (the other being war conditions experienced by Orwell). By 1937, a year after the civil war officially began, republican politics was becoming immensely complex but it could be generalized as a competition between the anarchists and the communists. While there was a republican government at the national level, various institutions and cities were controlled by different factions of the republican supporters, with the anarchists and the communists being the more influential factions.

The anarchists wanted a revolution in the sense that workers would control the means of production. The communists wanted those means controlled by the state. The rivalry created a civil war within a civil war, which the communists won and purged the anarchists from government (while I am in no way stating that Rafizi Ramli is an anarchist, the leading-PH party PKR did push Rafizi aside). That communist victory was irrelevant however. So weak was the government from infighting that they eventually succumbed to the fascist rebellion led by Francisco Franco, who would hold on to power for the next 40 years.

Orwell, who was fighting for the Spanish republic with the anarchists, saw the purging as a betrayal, which is perhaps the same feeling many Pakatan Harapan supporters currently feel of the current government. In fact, Orwell writes several pages about being disillusioned, which again, a feeling that appears to be widespread about Pakatan Harapan supporters.

Yes, he felt betrayed but the realist him wrote something for the disillusioned:

As for the newspaper talk about this being a ‘war for democracy’, it was plain eyewash. No one in his senses supposed that there was any hope for democracy, even as we understand it in England or France, in a country so divided and exhausted as Spain would be when the war was over. It would have to be a dictatorship, and it was clear that the chance of a working-class dictatorship had passed. That meant that the general movement would be in the direction of some kind of Fascism. Fascism called, no doubt, by some politer name, and—because this was Spain—more human and less efficient than the German or Italian varieties. The only alternatives were an infinitely worse dictatorship by Franco…

Whichever way you took it it was a depressing outlook. But it did not follow that the Government was not worth fighting for as against the more naked and developed Fascism of Franco and Hitler. Whatever faults the post-war Government might have, Franco’s regime would certainly be worse. [George Orwell. Homage to Catalonia. 1938]

In other words, “Nak PN ke?”

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Books, essays and others

[2998] Reading Dina Zaman’s Malayland

When communal conflicts hit the Malaysian headlines like how it did during the recent temple controversy near downtown Kuala Lumpur, identities would experience a kind of centripetal force. In this case, the Malay identity gets solidify in the popular imagination as hardliners—politicians and ordinary people alike—rally up the crowd to join in the fight. This is true with the other communities too. When egging for a fight, it is easier to rally up a generalized identity: Malays versus Indians or Muslims versus Hindus. To appeal to emotions, simplify. The controversy has been dialed down, but the ill-feeling still lingers.

How do we fight off that centripetal pull all with the hope of undoing all those riled up emotions?

Within that context, one is tempted to take the idea of centripetal forces on identities and invert it. Instead of generalizing, maybe it is useful to de-generalize and make identity a complicated idea, which it is.

If that is so, then reading of Dina Zaman’s Malayland will prove useful. In it, the author lays out the various Malaynesses that exist in contemporary Malaysia and briefly show interest of these subgroups is not always aligned and in fact almost always diverges. The Malays are not a monolithic community, a fact that is sometimes easy to forget.

The book is not an encyclopedia of Malay subgroups and the author explores what she seems to consider the most influential ones only. She provides actual individuals behind the labels. In that way, the book feels less theoretical and more real.

One criticism that keeps popping at the back of my mind while reading Malayland is its length. There are multiple instances where the author approaches the interesting (such as events that shaped the subgroups) but almost every time that happens, the elaboration does not happen. The path ends abruptly. It is a tease and the readers are left to their own devices to satisfy their curiosity.

But there are different ways to read. Different books require different approach. To approach one in a way it is not meant to be read will left any reader dissatisfied. I think here is where the foreword by Tunku Zain Al-‘Abidin Tuanku Muhkriz is useful in framing the right approach:

The subjects in Malayland show case an even broader set of identities than its predecessor of seventeen years before—Dina’s 2007 book I am Muslim. [Page IX. Malayland. Dina Zaman.]

The purpose of Malayland, if I as a reader could be so daring, is to show the existing diversity within the Malay community. It is neither an encyclopedia nor an academic work, which several critics of Malayland, I feel, implicitly rest their (and mine too) criticism upon. The book is window for those who do not already know of identity diversity and there are many who still do not know while living in a cocoon where their outside world is a caricature of prejudice. For them, Malayland is a hook to change a worldview.