I’ve known this Malaysian author since 2012, but this is the first time I’m actually getting to read his stories [The Painted Cat], now that he and his band of friends have gotten together to transcreate them from Malay to English.
And damn, these are a strange bunch of
tales,
spanning his career from 1992 to 2020. Some are straight-up social realist
works, like “Nayagi: The Mistress of Destiny”, about a Tamil girl [correction: Malayalee
girl] in the 1950s discovering she’s about to be married off to a man she doesn’t
love; while others are anarchic experimental/magical realist takes, like the
titular story, originally titled just “Cat” (which means “paint” in Malay),
about manically sexist parents who burn down the house and quote feminist
theorists, and a nine-lived polyglot cat who qualifies for a place in the
senior civil service.
Plus plenty in between. There’s really no telling
how a story will end, e.g. “A Tale of Paurnami/Cerita Paurnami”, which is
mostly a description of a full-moon festival which suddenly concludes with a
miracle, or “An Epic Ride/Perang Dalam Minda”, which appears to be a moralistic
retelling of the Mahabharata/Bhagavad Gita transposed onto a
rideshare—until it unexpectedly ends with the destination of a psychiatric
clinic. Uthaya’s definitely got a thing for both the
transcendent and bathos.
My fave’s probably “Strange Things/Yang Aneh-Aneh”, about a corporate fixer who
happens to have detachable limbs.
Mind you, this book does tend towards the
sentimental and directly critical a little too much, and the presentation—loads
of unnecessary literalist illustrations, endnotes explaining Tamil/Sanskrit terms,
pages of earnest praise quotes—gives the collection an air of amateurishness
that honestly doesn’t charm me.
Still, this is a fascinating entry point
into the world of multiethnic Malay-language literature, in which ethnic
minorities both celebrate and challenge their culture, just as folks do in
English.
That’s kinda what Singapore lost out on with our language policy—our mother
tongue literatures of Mandarin, Malay and Tamil end up in ethnic silos rather
than emerging as cosmopolitan conversations.
(Ng Yi-Sheng
is a Singaporean writer, researcher, and LGBT+ activist. This review of five
short prose collections was published in Singapore Unbound on 26 July 2024.)
