I would have much preferred to read this in the original language (French). But I couldn't find an electronic source, so I've had to make do with the translation. In the original, the title is Malaisie (Malaya), which is rather better, I feel, than the somewhat portentous "Soul of Malaya".

Currently exiled from my Malaysian home, I have found it a poignant read, evoking not a little nostalgia.

Of course, it is a work of its time (it was published in 1930, and won its author, Henri Fauconnier, the Prix Goncourt the same year). There is no escaping all the irritating old colonial tropes (the apparent tolerance of corporal punishment for workers; the "lazy native" stereotype; the annoying references to "little Malays" and "little brown men"...), and such cliches are particularly nauseating when wrapped up in equally irritating old gender tropes (Palaniai, the French narrator's Tamil mistress, is dismissed as "a plaything, a statuette", to be enjoyed but ultimately despised).


Henri Fauconnier

The story as such is slim. The narrator, Lescale (a rubber planter on what is now mainland Malaysia), is reunited with an acquaintance from the trenches of World War I, Rolain (another planter, who is now somewhat disengaged from the business, and makes Lescale his manager). They go off on a journey in the company of their two Malay servants (brothers, called Smail and Ngah), and live a brief (naked and male) idyll on an east coast beach. And in the culminating sequence, Smail becomes possessed by a malignant essence called a "badi", runs amok, kills Rajah Long, and is in turn killed by Rolain (who aims to save him from the degradation of the colonial justice system, and is consequently forced to disappear: "You must not try to find me," he warns Lescale).


The Pahang River


The east coast in contemporary times





The whole "amok" plot is a worrying bit of coloniality. Famously characterized by colonial administrator Frank Swettenham as a "furious attack" brought on by "a slight or insult", with the ultimate aim of courting death and therefore an end to the "intolerable feeling of injury and dishonour", amok can also be seen, in Eddie Tay's words, as "a trope that seeks to create an environment hospitable to the colonial enterprise".

It is not that the phenomenon of amok did not objectively exist (it is also described in indigenous narrative, Tay points out). The problem is that in colonial literature, the "depiction of the native who runs amok and attacks the members of his own family becomes a testimony to the native's irrationality". The implication is that "the colonisers are there to save the natives from themselves".

According to Aljunied : "While colonial writers and later scholars tend to attribute the causes of amok to moral shock, anomie or psychological distress, for [Malay anti-colonial activist] Burhanuddin [1911-69], amok is a creative energy that flows in the life and blood of every Malay, all of whom are naturally averse to foreign rule and exploitation. That is to say, amok only became widespread upon the imposition of European rule in the Malay world."

So there's a lot to find fault with. But if you can get past all that, there is also plenty to enjoy.

The book is a vehicle for some push-back (albeit ultimately insufficient) against colonial thought-patterns, for some quite interesting philosophizing, and -- above all -- for some lyrical descriptions of Malaya.

-- Challenging colonialist tropes (at least a little)

Rolain -- and his would-be disciple, Lescale -- do make a genuine attempt to understand and appreciate Malay culture. They esteem the Malay poetic form (the pantun) that Swettenham, for example, dismisses so readily (more on this in another post). Rolain also pushes back against essentialism, and rebukes Lescale for generalizing about the Malays: "Have you noticed that men have settled ideas only on subjects they have never thought about?" (He also generalizes about the Malays, but at least refrains from turning his generalizations into judgements: "It is not for us, who come of accursed races, to judge them.") According to the narrator, his mentor also appreciates the subtlety of the Malay language: "Malay is the easiest language. Everyone says so. It is also one of the most difficult. Rolain says so."

Their war experience has made them critical of Europe and any claimed superiority: "'The melancholy of Europe is not seen by those who have never left it,' said Rolain, "... It is a country in which I could no longer live; it is inhabited, not by human beings, but by marionettes... When you get back to Europe, you will see none but harassed people, all mistrustful, always on their guard, thinking only of defending their right to get the best place first."

And they are not uncritical of colonial "progress": The new road, for example, that has been built across a section of Malaya is "the whip of Europe laid across a new country".

I've already expressed some scepticism about the whole possession/amok plot, but at least the narrator does not trivialize or disbelieve the horror of what is happening to Smail. Nor does he mock Pa Daoud, the "sorcerer" who tries to heal the sufferer.

And, despite the ultimate paternalism of Rolain's killing of Smail, Lescale goes some way towards understanding the subversive quality of the amok condition: "Oh, to revolt for once against power, against everything organised and imposing, against civilisation and morality! Like Smail! That would be fine, exhilarating..."

So the book is a curious amalgam of the unquestioned and the probed. On the one hand, the language gratingly betrays a heedless superiority complex. On the other, there is a groping attempt to see things differently.


One of the illustrations by the author's brother, Charles Fauconnier

-- Extemporizing on the meaning of life

I'm not usually a fan of overtly philosophical novels.

But the characters in The Soul of Malaya often make perceptive and illuminating observations. On the life of the individual, for example:

"The river, what is it? The course that one may see formalised and drawn on maps -- or the water that it contains? The course is but provisional... Nothing is more unlike than drops of water. But the river is always called Sanggor.

"Am I a myriad drops of soul in a changing body, as illusory as a landscape?...

"After all, need I so dread the sea?..."



And on humankind's inevitable blindness:

"How is it, Rolain, that though the body has eyes in front to see the way, our consciousness has its eyes behind? Fate carries us on the back seat of a cart, so that we only see things after they have passed, and the road speeds dizzily away beneath us. Humanity is an explorer who advances backwards."

And on travel (with a strange applicability to our current locked-down days):

Rolain accuses Lescale: "Now you think you have exhausted Malaya. Nonsense. No country can be disappointing if you explore the depths of it. Satiety is a disease of the tourist. You must know how to turn over the page... Surely you must feel that you don't yet know Malaya."

And indeed, after their big, formative journey, Lescale reflects: "I was back on my plantation. The journey from that distant beach by the China sea took no more than one day: La Roque's new autocar, and my old Ford. I saw nothing of the marvels that had so dazzled me [during the slow journey by river]. I wonder what those tourists and writers who speed over the world think they see of it. One or two spots, perhaps, where they lingered a few days, and which they soon ceased to look at. My rapid journey made me understand the vastness of that world which they describe in so summary a fashion.

"My own small domain -- how vast it was! I walk among the trees I know so well... I feel I could almost address them by name."



-- Lyricizing Malaya

This was the aspect of the novel that I found most enjoyable. So much of what the narrator experiences is what I've experienced, and his descriptions are masterful. Some examples:

"At the end of a hibiscus avenue stood a little bungalow in a little garden on a little hill, all lost in an immensity of jungle that stretched away to the horizon like a storm-swept sea."

"It rains a great deal in Malaya, but dark and dismal days are unknown. The sky exults, or sheds abundant tears... In Malaya the seasons are hardly distinct. You do not die a little every year, as in Europe at the end of Autumn."

"The vertical sun poured like burning fluid from the tips of the motionless palm fronds. On the ground quivered a trellis-work of light and shadow; and in the air a shrill cicada squeaked like a pencil on a slate."

"[T]he wrinkled sea gleamed languidly beneath the sunlight. It seemed to be alive only round the edges, like a mollusc softly feeling the jutting rocks, and the hollows of the beaches, with its liquid flesh."

"The dim world was veiled in heavy wreathing vapours, the exhausted jungle was silent, and the sun, still alive though near to death -- the sun fell as an enemy falls, with a look of hatred."

A post-colonial lens, however, also invites us to challenge ourselves. Consider this passage:

"Ant-like I stood in all that vastness; it seemed to absorb me as though I had been a raindrop. I was in it and I felt its remoteness, I observed but I did not understand. Beyond the narrow circle of trees that barred my vision began the vast domain of mystery, and even around me in the play of shadow and the shafts of sunlight, among the shivering palm fronds and the rustle of the foliage that no wind can reach, in the dim agitation that encompassed me as subtle as the circulation of the blood beneath the skin, I discovered stranger mirages than those of the desert and felt the faint pressure of unknown forces."

And, responding to Rolain's challenge that he can't feel he knows Malaya, Lescale answers: "The other night when we were talking about the spirits of the dead, I suddenly saw the place as a mystery untouched, unfathomable.... And there was I, like a little bewildered insect. You spoke of satiety -- it isn't that. It's more like terror."



Does this all take us uncomfortably close to classic "heart of darkness" tropes, where the non-Western world represents "a zone of mystery and magic" that contrasts with the "relative order and security" of the West? Or is it just the outsider's awed recognition of an atmosphere that animates hundreds of Malaysian (and other Southeast Asian) ghost and horror stories?

How much of my love of Malaysia is informed by perhaps unconsciously held stereotypes? I don't honestly know. But it's worth being alive to the question.

So, a sometimes uncomfortable read, but through its capacity to raise interesting questions, a very rewarding one.