The modern classics of Southeast Asian literature, with the singular exception of Pramoedya Ananta Toer, largely remain a blank spot on the English-language literary map. Thank goodness, then, that Penguin Southeast Asia has in recent years published translations from, for example, Vietnamese and Tagalog; Pauline Fan’s recent translation of a collection of Malay short fiction by the iconic writer Fatimah Busu is a welcome addition.
In her introduction to An Ordinary Tale About Women and Other Stories, Fan—the erstwhile director of the George Town Literary Festival—describes Fatimah Busu, whose first published story dates from 1959, as “elusive”. As far as English-language material is concerned, this is most certainly the case—online information regarding the author is notable mostly for its brevity. But it appears to be the case in the author’s native Malay as well. Fan writes that
Many of her works have been out-of-print for decades and are highly sought after in second-hand book circles in Malaysia… Despite her significant contributions to Malay literature, Fatimah Busu has been sidelined by the literary bureaucracy in the past few decades. Her feisty outspokenness, fearlessness in addressing social taboos, and unconventional narrative approach evidently made some quarters uneasy with her and her work.
Although many of Basu’s stories use graphic and even aggressive imagery—“feisty” is putting it mildly—anglophone readers are unlikely to be very shocked, although they might be surprised. One can imagine that a literary establishment manifested in a government run Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Institute of Language and Literature) might look askance at some of them.
The stories in this collection range from social realism to reworkings of classic tales from Malay epics and myth. The lead story, “At the Edge of a River”, tells of a family being kicked off their land just as their house is being put up; the father had voted for an independent party in the last election rather than the powers-that-be. Life however goes on.
The title story, more a series of vignettes, tells of women (and often their children) abandoned by their husbands. There is poverty, adultery, infanticide. The simple language lands like a hammer, each vignette accentuated by a final “End of story.”
“The Scrawny Cat” is a story—written when Fatimah Busu was just 16—about a missing pet, with a Roald Dahl type twist at the end, but more brutal. “Spilled Rice” is about rural China who accidentally consume poisonous mushrooms. It is, writes Fan, one of the author’s “most iconic stories”:
The story’s unflinching depiction of rural hardship, childhood innocence, and tragedy earned it a Hadiah Sastera prize from Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka and led to its adaptation into a telemovie in 1986.
The stories then drift into magic realism and the paranormal, if not the supernatural. The epistolary “A Letter to Mother in Kampong Pasir Pekan” tells of the arrival of multitudinous dajjal, here a sort of miniature demon, that get into the food and copulate in full view. In “Watching the Rain”, a mother and son gather feathers from the jentayu bird to fly up into the clouds. They watch what appear to be fireworks on the land below, but rather than Hari Raya, they are witnessing “bombs going off in Sarajevo”. After observing much human misery, they meet a woman, who tells them:
My name is Mariam bint Imran. This is my son, Isa. I gave birth to him without a father. My people cursed me, so my family hid me away here.
Fan refrains, in her translation, of giving the Christian rendition of the names as Mary and Jesus. There is more to it than that, of course.
One day, my son will become a Prophet of God. He will spread the word of the true religion. Remember, we were born to be single mothers; suffering is our fate. This fate is cheerfulness and joy for a single mother.
“The Dowry of Desire” is a flamboyant retelling of the legend of Puteri Gunung Ledang, a celestial princess.
At midday, when the sun was at its zenith, the Princess went to bathe and swim in a pond filled with red roses that had been scattered by Dang Raya Rani and the entourage. While the Princess was bathing, Dang Raya Rani and the seven lady’s maids were lingering patiently around the pond. Bearing a new set of robes for the Princess, in seven colours with seven kinds of flowers tucked into the folds, they sang pantun verses praising the beauty of the Princess from head to toe.
In this version, the princess has taken to riding on her flying horse entirely naked, driving the various potentates of the region—from Majapahit to Malacca—mad with desire. She final settles on the Sultan of Malacca, of whom she demands (as per the legend) the following dowry:
seven trays filled with the hearts of mosquitoes, seven trays filled with the hearts of germs, a barrel of tears, a barrel of young betel nut juice, a bowl of the king’s blood, a bowl of the blood of his prince named Raja Ahmad. To ease his journey, the Raja of Malacca must build a golden bridge and a silver bridge from his palace to the peak of Gunung Ledang.
In attempting to fulfill these demands, the Sultan destroys his realm.
As much a curator here as a translator, Fan’s translation is nonetheless vivid and the language urgent. Fatimah Busu was fortunate, as are we, to have Fan as her advocate. There is nothing particularly “ordinary” about the stories in the collection, or the women in them.
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