Interlok distorts history

January 14, 2011

Interlok gets its history wrong

By Terence Netto

Abdullah Hussain’s literary work is weakened by historical canards that ought to embarrass a national laureate.–Netto

Potential readers of Interlok, the Malay literature text presently the subject of raging controversy, may no longer be that keen to procure copies after having searched in vain for them at popular bookstores before the school term began 11 days ago.

This is because excerpts secreted in web news portals and newspaper columns the last few days suggest the novel has got some things pretty drastically wrong. Initially, the yen for the book was whetted by the threat of assorted NGOs to burn copies of the novel said to be defamatory to Indian Malaysians.

A threat like that usually results in the curious hastening to find out at source what the hubbub is all about. One recalls what the bounty offered in 1988 by Ayatollah Khomeini for the murder of Salman Rushdie did for Satanic Verses after the Iranian leader decreed Rushdie’s book as derogatory of Islam: it sent sales skyrocketing, which must have been fortuitous for the publisher given the tedium of the novel.

Now, after the disclosure of controversial parts of Interlok’s narrative, the book has the effect of spurring those hitherto only mildly disturbed by what is being bruited about the new history syllabus for secondary school students, to ratchet up their concern several notches.

If a former national literary laureate like Abdullah Hussain, author of Interlok, can get the facts — which are by no means difficult to obtain through research and easily perceptible by way of mingling with the objects of his observation – wrong, then the writing of our history could be in serious trouble.

But before that, a word about novels and the narrative art.

With Interlok, published in 1971, Abdullah Hussein was supposed to have written a novel of manners and morals of individuals supposedly emblematic of the Malaysian races – Malay, Chinese and Indian.

Usually, such novels allow opportunities for riffs on history, philosophy, and culture by the author that help illuminate the struggles of the characters the author depicts in his work of imagination.

These struggles test and define the individuals as they strive to transcend their circumstances or are overcome by it.  Initially, one felt that the Interlok controversy resembled ones that periodically well up when a famous novel becomes the subject of a film, or when the centenary of a great work, or the birth centenary of a famous author is celebrated.

In such instances, critics weigh in with comments or interpretive studies that may take issue with one or the other aspect of the film or novel. There may follow a controversy that may rage for some time. At times, literary critics are about as difficult to disarm as dictators.

It appears from slivers of the novel appearing in web stories and newspaper columns that the controversy over Interlok, contrary to initial assumptions, is not sourced in interpretive dissonance.

The controversy is over the geographical, cultural and linguistic origins of Indian Malaysians which the author got wrong, a matter he could easily have gotten right – just by research and by mingling with Indian Malaysians.

The comparable error would be if the Indonesian writer, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, author of the famed Buru quartet, got the ethnic origins and social class of his protagonists, Minke and Annalies, wrong in Bumi Manusia (This Earth of Mankind), the first installment of the quartet.

The story of Minke’s voyage through the political and cultural currents of Indonesia’s 20th century genesis as a nation, and of his tie to his love interest, Annalies, is rendered the more moving by the author’s depiction of the lovers’ conflicting ethnic origins and class.

In novel writing, the aphorism, “Everyone is entitled to his opinions but not to the facts,” is as true as it is for sociological and political works. A writer’s imagination can roam but he cannot abstract facts from their vital context and falsify them. To do so would be to leave the realm of imaginative fiction for fantasy, which is a different thing altogether.

By getting facts wrong about the geographical, cultural and linguistic origins of Indian Malaysians, Abdullah Hussein, ironically, displays the very weakness he faults in the Malay character of the same novel: laziness.

Through research and through social mingling, he would have known that not all Indian Malaysians are from the dalit caste and that the Tamil language, even the Hindu religion, is not generic to all south Indians.

There’s another reason why Abdullah Hussain’s mistake is egregious. Good novels avoid the serving up of scenes and characters in broad strokes — simplifying and exaggerating them such that the principals involved become little more than ciphers, unlit from within.

Avoidance of caricature ought to be the objective of a novelist attempting a work about different races living in promixity, with occupational and social paths that intersect, with consequent opportunities for the discovery of a common humanity or its reverse, suspicion and hostility.

In his description of the origins of Indian Malaysians, Abdullah Hussain falls into the trap of broad and false generalization. He was reported to have begun writing Interlok 10 years after Merdeka, at a moment of generational transition.

One would have expected of someone like Abdullah Hussain who went on to become a national laureate that he would have approached the task with a heightened sense of responsibility, with due care for historical and human authenticity.

Instead he has confused fact with fiction, reality with illusion. The fact that the education ministry has allowed Interlok to become an examination text for literature suggests that Malaysians must be wary indeed of the same ministry’s approach to our history which will soon be a compulsory subject at secondary level.

People who are indifferent to the distinction between fiction and fact in literary works are hardly likely to be better at telling them apart in historiography.