SLEEPING WITH GREAT BOOKS: A child remembers the early Seventies
(excerpt
from a forthcoming memoir)
If there were two very close friends in my life and especially
during my childhood, they were: 1) An imaginary friend who had multiple
personalities who lived on a tree I frequently climb, and 2) Great books I
slept with.
I don’t know what fascinated me about the power of words and
about imaginary friends I could run around with and have battles with behind
locked doors. I will not talk about that imaginary friend for now.
Books, books, books... how great they are. I remember these
friends of mine.
Early books
I slept with a world history book Sejarah Dunia, ‘Hikayat
Bayan Budiman’ and ‘Hikayat Seribu Satu Malam’. I can still remember the
delightfully musky smell of those classics. The history book was light green,
the Hikayat Bayan Budiman light yellow, and the Hikayat Seribu Satu
Malam was light brown... light reading there was not. Then there were also
some bawdy Jawi magazines I found at home, called Mustika I
secretly read. Scantily-clad Malay women “berkemban” adorned the cover
page. They were not real photos but something that looked like water-color
paintings.
I read novels too. I found them in my mother’s closet or ‘gerobok’
as the Johoreans would call it. The novels were in Jawi, the Malay
writing that uses Arabic scripts. My mother knew I loved reading and subscribed
to Reader’s Digest for me to spend time in between eating, roaming the village,
and playing soccer alone in the field across my kampong house. I looked forward
to the postman delivering each issue of the book that opened windows to the
American culture. I loved the feature sections as well as those that made me
chuckle and laugh - ‘Humour in Uniform’ and ‘Laughter the Best Medicine’, and
in general, what living in America is about.
We didn't have much in our house – not much “cargo” as the New
Guinean Yali, in UCLA evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond’s study Guns
Germs, and Steel called possessions -- just the basics of a family
on the level of village poverty, but I had enough time and interest to read and
be wealthy with myths, tales, legends, and stories. My best friends: words.
That became flesh. And inscriptions. And installations of spaces of knowledge
and power, as I later wrote about in my doctoral dissertation at Columbia
University in the City of New York.
A book about a bloody riot
My fondest memory was reading a banned book: 13 Mei: Sebelum dan Selepas or May 13: Before and After, written by the first Prime
Minister of Malaysia, Tunku Abdul Rahman. My mother told me it was “haram” to
read it and the book was at home because my father who was a soldier in the
Malay Regiment in Singapore was given a copy. He spent many years patrolling
the jungles as far as Jesselton, Sabah, fighting the Communists who were keen
on taking over Malaya and install a Mao-Leninist style rule. So, my father was
in the then British Malaya Malay Regiment, though a mere prebet
(private) trying to defend the country from Chin Peng, Rashid Mydin, Abdullah
CD, Shamsiah Fakeh, and the merry band of Malayan Commies who knew only
violence and terrorism to affect social change.
The banned book on the bloodiest incident in Malayan history
were Malays fought and killed the Chinese especially in Kuala Lumpur, was about
the prime minister blaming the “young Turk” Dr. Mahathir Mohamad for helping
Tun Razak (Najib's father) to secure power because the young and ambitious
leaders were feeling that the first prime minister was giving too much freedom
for the Chinese to control the economy. Later I came across many stories
concluding that Tun Razak planned the riots so that he could use the Emergency
Rule to take over the country. A theory.
That’s the banned book I read when I was a kid. I was of course
confused as to why there were also talks that Malay folks in my village were
preparing themselves with martial arts skills and “magic powers” and with red
headbands with the Arabic phrase “LailahailAllah” (There is no god but
God) were getting ready to travel to the city of Kuala Lumpur in the village of
Kampung Baru to do one thing: to “slaughter the Chinese”!
(Today, there is a revival of the ideology of Communism in
Malaysia, amongst the leftist-activists in her public and private
universities.)
Yes, May 13, 1969. What a horrifying memory of a child of
perhaps 10 years old to have!
Before Google
I always had a pocket-sized encyclopedia in my schoolbag; one
that has everything about serious and fun facts such as world’s longest,
tallest, highest, lowest this and that, capital of cities, famous quotes of the
English Language, and tons of information that I could ‘google’ by flipping the
pages every time I want I would read the little encyclopedia I bought at an
Indian bookstore in the Main Bazaar (Pasar Besar) of Johor Baru of the late
sixties.
I was happy that I knew so many things and I could quiz my
friends on and be able to answer end-of-day questions on general knowledge my
teachers in school would ask the class, the reward for the correct answer was
to leave the class five or ten minutes earlier than everybody else.
I could them start playing outside those extra minutes while
waiting for my ride home. I could play my ‘bola chopping’, ‘sepak yem’,
‘gundu’, ‘superhero cards’, ‘chepeh’, or those games boys of that time played.
Later when I was sent off to a boarding school in the coastal
town of Kuantan at a tender young age of 12, I was introduced to a good
librarian (and a homeroom ‘mother’). It was said to be an experimental American
school in Malaysia, modeled after the Bronx School of the Gifted in Science and
the kids were openly called the “guinea pigs” by the educationists.
We were selected through nationwide IQ tests and most eligible
were kids from very poor families who were padi planters, rubber
tappers, shopkeepers, and fishermen. In my case, I was a child of a Malay
Regiment army prebet (private) and a seamstress who later became an
electronic factory worker, assembling microchips for Siemens, in Singapore,
going to work at 5 in the morning and coming home on a bus at 7 at night. She
raised the five of us with earnings from the two jobs.
Adult books
Coming from a kampong in Johor Baru and as a child getting
chased out of bookstores almost daily for ‘just reading’ and not buying those
‘mini-encyclopedia’ from which I tried to memorize the interesting facts, the
Kuantan school was like the Library of Congress! There I read an encyclopedia
of Charles Manson cover to cover, a pictorial coffee-table book of ‘The
Godfather’, world maps, American movies, the story of rock and roll, and The
Beatles. Some of my favorite books I read at fifteen were A. S. Neill’s Summerhill
and Dr. Spock’s Radical Child Rearing, and later ‘The Wanderers’.
And I fell in love with the Asterix and The King is a
Fink series.
At the age of 12 or 13, too, I got hold of a book Education
and Ecstasy by the American social reconstructionist in education, George
Leonard. It was in my school's library. I liked it and read it twice and
remembered the part where he discussed the importance of the child, with the
help of adult members of the tribe, to speak about what he/she dreamt of as
important data to help members of society to move on.
I thought the sight of children sitting in their little ‘chawat’
or tribal hot pants talking about their dreams to adults in bigger ‘chawat’
interpreting dreams was cool. I suppose George Leonard was very much influenced
by the idea of the sixties of which Anthropology was beginning to a break-away
from its colonial mode’ with actually the influence of Margaret Mead as a
‘spokesperson of the sixties’.
Later Mario Puzo’s The Godfather novel became a favorite,
leading me to read more and more stuff from the gangster-movie genre; The
Don is Dead, Omerta, Bonnie and Clyde, etc. Another favorite
was Papillon, which was later made into a movie starring Steve McQueen.
It was always a pleasure to be in the library stocked with
readings on American culture. Whether influential or not, I read Dale
Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.
No, I was not interested in influencing anyone, not interested
in girls, too, because then I thought they were strange annoying creatures, nor
was I interested in becoming an influential politician. I was simply interested
in the title of it! Sounded like how to see ghosts and communicate with them.
Hanging out, hanging around, and ‘chilling’ I was in that
reading joint back in the day, listening to the teachers and the librarian
gossiping too.
In my high school library
The library sometimes feels like a Barnes and Noble cafe in New
York city - there would always be those little boarding school children hanging
out, hanging around, and ‘chilling’ with the librarian-cum-homeroom mother and
one of my favorite English teachers! May God bless her soul wherever she is. I
will write about my other English teachers later. It was also a gossiping
joint.
I continue to read Greek and Roman mythology and my World
History book (in Malay) every time I go home. The library of Sultanah Aminah in
Johor Baru was another place I loved best.
A deeply shining moment in one of my English teacher's effort to
make teaching interesting was when she brought a friend of hers, I think from
Universiti Malaya to our English Club meeting and performed this short
existentialist play concerning a corpse that kept growing and growing out of
the closet, maybe Eugene Ionesco’s short play ‘Amedee’. (Or How to Get Rid
of It.)
It was such an effective two-woman performance by the duo Miss
Rahmah and Miss Maznah that I got so scared towards the end and had a nightmare
right there in the dorm.
That was one of the many moments of effective teaching. Later in
life I became very interested in French existentialist literature, reading more
Ionesco, and obsessed with Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and
finally immersed myself in Existentialism. I went on to read the major classics
of English and World Literature.
My English teacher taught me two words with which I can never
forget how excited I was when I was in Form One; the words were ‘nocturnal
incursion’. I got so obsessed with the words that they became part of me - I
started sneaking out at, many nights and got myself free to roam the city of
Kuantan at night and see what ‘nocturnal incursions’ means, and what freedom
entails or escape from Alcatraz is about.
I read that novel Papillon, about life in a French
prison, three times when I was in Form Three. I read ‘The Godfather’ novel five
times. Later I found out that Saddam Hussein’s favorite movie was ‘The
Godfather’!
She got us to read a novel, Istvan Zolda, about a soldier
in Yugoslavia during the time of the war of the Partisans.
When I was in Form One she told me that I had “perfect English”.
I was thrilled, excited, flattered. But I found out later that it was not true
at all. I still work with brutal editors for all of my writings, while at the
same time editing other people’s work.
May all the good work be blessed. Teachers like them are rare
these days; they are now politicized.
My mother smarter than Paulo Freire
Such is the joy of reading back in the day - before Facebook,
WhatsApp, iPads, and the culture of Mat and Minah Rempit, Jihadists. And
terrorists by any name.
And bless my mother's soul for showing me the power of the word.
With her schooling to only Primary Three (Darjah Tiga,) she was smarter
than Paulo Freire, the Marxist-Leninist Brazilian educator, I presume. Certainly
more peaceful than Marx, Engels, and Lenin combined.
She was my pedagogue. Of
hope. And love.
And books? My dear
friends they are.
