It has been three years since Alfian Sa’at’s Malay Sketches^[1] (2012) came out in print, however, its subject matters, its poignancy, and the elegance of its language warrant no less than this review as we propel into Singapore’s 50th year of independence. Complemented by whimsical illustrations by Shahril Nizam Ahmad, and arranged in such a way that every few stories are marked by a place and time stamp (“Paya Lebar, 5 AM” to “Kaki Bukit, 3 AM”) by way of showing progression, Malay Sketches is a collection of flash fiction and vignettes centered on the themes and concepts of Malayness and Malay lives in Singapore.

INVOKING THE FAMILIAR
In his critique, “On the Subject of Race”, Laremy Lee, notes how “Alfian often resorts to negative stereotypes of the Malay community” in order to “quickly convey plot points and themes to the reader”^[2].

Within the stories, we find easily recognizable characters: the drug addict, the driver, the single mother, and the pregnant teens. There are also scenes that may be familiar to some of us: concerned Malay mothers telling their children to be more like the Chinese (“Shallow Focus”, 73), even going so far as to tell them to only hang out with Chinese kids in the hope that their merits—“a competitive spirit and a natural aptitude in Maths” (“His Birthday Present”, 131)—will rub off onto them. There are the educated elites and professionals who are burdened by the expectations to improve perceptions of the community (“Cold Comfort”, 51), even as they are irked by the failures of their brethren to break out of the vicious cycles of destitution and social immobility. We also find the religious and cultural boundaries that have been considered a racial characteristic of the Malays: the disapproval and horror of handling dogs (“A Howling”, 113), a teenage girl’s outright rejection of shaking the President’s hand on stage because she was not supposed to come into contact with the opposite gender (“Losing Touch”, 21), and a mother’s concerns about party food not being halal (“His Birthday Present”), and whether her son’s paintbrush bristles are made of pig’s hair (“Child”, 213).

These are stories we have heard time and again—the tensions of race perceptions (“Shallow Focus”, 73), the difficulties of reconciling modern society with cultural and religious practices (“Visitors”, 175), and the problems, reiterated first, it seems, within the spaces of media and sociopolitical rhetoric, and then now inscribed in the eloquent words of fiction. So, it is easy to point out where Malay Sketches fails to overturn the larger-known narratives of its subject community.

RESPONDING TO, AND INCITING RESPONSE
However, it is my belief that there is more to Malay Sketches than meets the critical eye. Talking about the inspirations for the book at its launch at KLAB in 2012, Alfian revealed that some are taken from “(sic) episodes in real life, some from stories that people have told [him]; some are even from headlines” which he then tried to re-imagine as stories^[3]. He shared that the book is partly a “reaction to journalism”, or more specifically, to “the way journalism is practiced in Singapore”. For him, the myth of journalism being more objective than literature is untrue and noted how the stories on drugs, divorce, and unwanted pregnancies found in the Malay newspapers serve as a diagnosis of the “problems of the problem minority” and the “social mythologies that the community has got to solve”. He considered journalism reductive, pointing out how the “ugly statistics that [we] keep on publishing to warn the community to pull up its socks and find some collective action” in fact centres the people as the problem as opposed to people who are, like any other, facing challenges in their lives.

The Malay/Muslim community is multifaceted, and the way Alfian shows this is by giving these same characters and their stories a universal human touch. There is magnanimity in the character of Suhaili from “Sacrifice” (57), who becomes the pharmakos^[4] so that her lover would not be incarcerated. Melancholy and nostalgia permeates “After Dusk Prayers” (37) which features an elderly lady feeding cats, absentmindedly forgetting to lock her gate out of old, kampung habit. “The Bath” (101) takes on the lasting stigma of bearing a sexually-transmitted disease with the story of a pengurus jenazah⁵ who has to tend to a body covered in late-stage AIDS lesions, which even in death is shunned by his family. A husband rediscovers his love for his wife after considering his inability to give her the life she deserves in “Reunion” (141), and a son struggles with his father’s growing dementia in “A Toyol Story” (149). A man gets his heart broken when the woman he longs for does not feel the same way for him in “Singapore By Night” (169) and “Gravity” (163) sees the concerned thoughts of a divorced father spending a precious weekend with his daughter. “Child” (213) and “The Boy At the Back of the Bus” (209) exude the warmth and joy of fragile innocence.

Alfian wishes for the book to be received on two levels: Malays being able to relate to the stories within, and for non-Malays to have a better understanding of the lived realities of their country brethren. However, what struck me about some of these stories is how a number of the characters remain unnamed—should they be read isolated from a collection so titled, Malay Sketches, they could easily have been the narratives of any other person, of any other race. Whatever the readers’ views—whether the book falls back on to the stereotypes it should have been avoiding, or whether it has covered the whole breadth of the ‘Malay experience’ in Singapore—Malay Sketches is still an important Singaporean read, for its efficient prose and beautifully-rendered images, if not for its ability to create much needed dialogue. ⬛

¹ Alfian Sa’at . Malay Sketches. Illustrations: Shahril Nizam Ahmad. Singapore: Ethos Books, 2012.
² Lee, Laremy. “On the Subject of Race”. Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Vol. 11, No, 3. Jul 2012.
³ Book Launch: {Malay Sketches} by Alfian Sa’at @ KLAB 2012. Organised by Ethos Books. (Youtube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F14Q-2HQj7Q).
⁴ A figure in Greek religion of a human scapegoat that is used in state rituals.
⁵ Undertaker.

Dr Nuraliah Norasid graduated from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) with a Bachelor in Arts (with Honours) in 2009 and a Doctor of Philosophy, with a specialisation in Creative Writing and Contemporary Mythopoesis, in 2015. She is a Research Associate with the Centre for Research in Islamic and Malay Affairs. Formerly, she has taught Creative Writing, Singaporean Literature, and Introduction to English Literature at NTU. She has also served as a writing coach and consultant with the Language and Communication Centre (LCC) at the same university.