Making sense of Malay literary life on the so-called Malay Peninsula in late colonial days is not an easy undertaking: any comprehensive statement about its configurations is bound to be challenged by the musings over a single text from that place and period. But then, conversely, making sense of a single Malay text from those late colonial days is an equally difficult venture: it will unavoidably lead to the invocation of an indefinite number of other texts that helped shape the configurations of literary life. In these contradictory dynamics, the work of Abdul Rahim Kajai – self-proclaimed ‘pure Malay’, author, writer, journalist and public intellectual (1894–1943) – should sparkle in hazy radiance, like a crystal, multifaceted, without a visible core.
On the Peninsula in the 1930s, poetry in Malay was still in high demand. Lithographed editions of all sorts of syair, elegant and meaningful discursive plays on distinct rhymes and rhythms, had been available since the late nineteenth century, and in the 1930s shorter poems, cautiously improvising on these syair – symbols of tradition – began to appear in periodicals, slowly but steadily pushing lithographs towards the margins of readers' immediate attention. A wild variety of tales were being published in the form of leaflets and books, which the authors themselves at times had to go out selling if they wanted to make money from their work. Shorter tales and essays appeared in periodicals in between reports about the latest developments in the world out there, particularly in the Peninsula and the Islands, including commentaries, pictures, advertisements, accounts of assembly meetings, and readers' letters. There was also the Club of Penfriends (Sahabat Pena) which, initiated in Penang in 1934, expanded at a bewildering pace by way of letters, articles and discussions, carried along by stories and complaints about the miserable situation of the Malays on the Peninsula which they claimed belonged to them, children of the soil, alone.
Literacy was not low: an average of some 35 per cent of male Malays – higher on the West Coast, lower on the East Coast, highest in the cities – could read and write a letter in the early thirties, the numbers of reading and writing women being considerably lower. A growing number of people tried their pens and eyes with the Jawi (Arabic-based) script, emulating the religious texts, manuscripts and lithographs through which they had learnt to read and write in madrasahs (religious schools) and other educational institutions; Jawi was to remain the predominant form of writing until the early 1950s. More and more people also learnt to read Malay in the Latin script known as Rumi, a capacity which gave them access to very diverse publications from the Dutch Indies as well as piecemeal English publications available on the Peninsula: unusual topics, curious language. The discussions about Islam among Malays in cities and countryside, usually described as manifestations of the conflict between Kaum Muda (Young Group or ‘modernists’) and Kaum Tua (Old Group or ‘traditionalists’), were inspired and guided by publications of all sorts, from many places, in various languages.Footnote 1
At the same time, people were still telling each other stories, long and short, funny and serious. At times this happened in a public performance: tellers of tales were wandering around in the countryside, theatre companies had their shows in villages and cities. At times it occurred on a more direct interpersonal level in tales, ‘combining the lore of faraway places with the lore of the past’ and always driven by the desire to share experiences and have counsel.Footnote 2 Much has been lost, and much has gone unrecorded. Much has been forgotten, and much has been ignored, including the interventions, direct or indirect, of writings, shows, movies and conversations in Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, Tamil and English languages that surrounded and interacted with Malay-speaking people on all sides. Altogether, it would be very hard, if not impossible, to even try to fully comprehend the dynamics of Malay letters, and it is tempting to follow the example of others and work towards some kind of fragmentary signification only, fragile and specious, ever open to supplementation and challenge.
While reading and browsing through textual materials published in the 1930s, it is easy to become particularly absorbed by the apparent rise of Malay nationalism, the awareness of being Malay. Many publications seem to be centred around the terms ‘bangsa’ and ‘sedar’ (usually glossed in this context as ‘nation’ and ‘awakening’ respectively),Footnote 3 glorious words that have emerged very prominently in retrospective discussions about Malay writing before the Japanese period, pushing interconnected terms referring to kingship, poverty, misery, plurality, religion, Chinese, society and foreigners to the margins of attention, porous and flexible as the configurations of literary life were. Those were the days, distant and enchanting, when Malay identity was being shaped: ‘Malayness’ (takrif Melayu). Writing about the 1930s easily tends to slide into nostalgia, driven as it is by a longing that creates evocations of the past that are of necessity inauthentic and unreal, ‘because the past it seeks has never existed except in narrative’.Footnote 4
Writing of writing is permeated by current memories and present desires; it is contained by the materials available. Fragments of Malay writing in the 1930s could be transcribed into short evocations of an ideal world, an ideal that is not lived in the present, discontinuous and confrontational, and is projected onto a past, transparent like a dream, future and past at once. Nostalgia is the name for these acts of deference, inspired by dissatisfaction and unease with the very present. Acts they are, in Susan Stewart's terms, of ‘repetition that mourn the inauthenticity of all repetition and deny the repetition's capacity to form identity’.Footnote 5 Nostalgia comprises the ongoing endeavour of combining the experience of the inadequate present with the desire for the completed past, in the process shaping tales that, radiating an elegant inauthenticity, could move present-day readers deeply. Nostalgia flares up when the impulse to present the past – to write of writing – obstructs the attempt at writing reality — and the other way around, when the effort to represent reality frustrates the wish to present memories, the desire to write of writing.
Writing of the 1930s in literary life has become writing about the glorious if grim ‘awakening’ (sedar) of the Malay ‘nation’ (bangsa). Writing about Kajai's writings, largely published in the 1930s, leads to nostalgia, almost inevitably so: those were the days when Malay identity was being discovered, discussed and formulated, while these are the days when Malay interests have to be defended and preserved. Not only is reading about acts of discovery more gratifying than writing about acts of preservation, commemorative dreams are more rewarding than particular actualities, too.
If only discussing the challenge of showing the growing awareness of ‘Malayness’, a survey of the configuration of Malay writing in the 1930s may be most persuasive when it is undertaken on the commemorative assumption that ‘Malayness’ became manifest in discursive knots, evoked and confirmed by the appearance of particular texts, specific narratives. Here and there and everywhere on the Peninsula, time and again, strings of words were brought together. They vibrated in a knot for a while and then disintegrated again, leaving but hazy echoes and gossamer, and then somewhere else other knots emerged, only to disappear again in echoes and traces — like mushrooms in a mycelium, like dots in a network of unpredictable and volatile connections. Some of these discursive knots formed around a group of Penfriends or around a group of students at an educational institution, such as Sultan Idris Teachers' College in Perak, while others centred around a group of poets and performers of poetry; still others moved around a periodical, such as Utusan Melayu and Pengasuh, or around the writings of the person who managed some periodicals, such as Abdul Rahim Kajai and Muhammad Yusof bin Ahmad. The nostalgia that emerges from writing the ever-shifting commemorations of these knots could be summarised in yet another metaphor: it radiates from crystals, multifaceted, precious and translucent substances, without a core.Footnote 6
Newspapers and other periodicals, bestsellers for a day or two, were neither very numerous nor very long-lasting on the Peninsula. Mainly produced in or around the urban centres of Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Kota Bharu and Penang, they were certainly not omnipresent, and their readership was rather limited.Footnote 7 Apparently hardly ever more than 1,500 copies of a periodical were printed, which had, of course, a manifold of 1,500 readers, and an indefinite manifold of 1,500 listeners as well.Footnote 8 Witness the by now winged evocation of Malay reading by Za'ba in his survey of contemporaneous Malay writing before the Japanese invasion, another appropriate starting point for nostalgic reminiscences about literary life:
To say nothing of the towns where these papers are always available at every Malay bookshop and some of them at the various Malay clubs, and read even by the motor-cars' drivers, one notices that the peasant folks of the kampongs [villages] are also taking keen interest in what is said in the surat khabar [newspaper] about other parts of Malaya and the world. Often, on an evening, one sees at the wayside Chinese shop some lettered man, perhaps an old guru of the local school or perhaps the local penghulu [headman of a small village], reading one or other of these papers, and a little crowd of elderly people, less literate than he is, eagerly listening, questioning, and commenting around him. Thus they learn about what is happening in the rest of the world, thereby making themselves ever less and less the proverbial ‘frog under the coconut shell’Footnote 9.
The knots and dots in the network of Malay writings – shaped in the convergence of writing and reading, reciting and listening – may have been scattered and short-lived in the 1930s, yet they were strong enough to generate the energy that is needed to open them up towards the present, leaving echoes, memories and repetitions in their wake. Some of these knots have been given more authority, if not inauthenticity, in the multiple available narratives of Malay writing, reaching the present on ever more carefully selected echoes and traces, conveyed by way of memories and nostalgia. Abdul Rahim Kajai and his work are a good example of this selectivity.
In the 1930s, story-tellers and singers of tales were innumerable, literally so. Letter writers and authors were numerous as well, and the same can be said of their multiple and diffused publics. Journalists, however, were rare, as Abdul Rahim Kajai complains to Samad Ahmad when the latter comes to tell the big man that he wants to try his luck with writing books rather than pursuing a career in journalism. Journalists are easily forgotten, the young Samad tells his temporary boss; if you want to have a name, you have to be a writer, or even an author who, as a matter of course, should still give guidance and advice to his community of readers, just like journalists. Kajai's reaction – ‘I am happy for you, Samad’ (ikut suka Samadlah) – is strong enough to make Samad Ahmad nostalgically repeat their conversation in his detailed reminiscences some 40 years later.Footnote 10 His words are strong enough, too, to develop second thoughts about the adventures of Samad Ahmad's happiness. He did indeed become an author of books with a certain fame, a certain income, a distinct guidance; in particular, his tales about history – ‘historical novels’ are effective tools to incite nationalist fervour in every literary lifeFootnote 11 – found an eager public, and, print capitalism in action, these books rewarded him with respectable profit and popularity.
However, being a famous author (to be ‘just like Shakespear [sic.]’ was Samad's deficient dream) does not necessarily imply that one's work will not lose its radiance or that its echoes will be heard for ever, and there is irony in the fact that Kajai's fame for his journalistic work, including the tales he wrote later in his life for the periodicals he edited, has come to overshadow the fame Samad Ahmad gained from his novels. Kajai did not live to see his work collected in books — the second step towards writerly fame on the Pensinsula like everywhere else, publication in periodicals being the first as yet unsteady one. A first edition of his tales, still in Jawi, appeared in four volumes in Singapore in 1949, and since then a variety of his articles, sketches and tales have been reprinted in newspapers, in numerous anthologies of ‘early modern Malay literature’ and ‘early Malay newspapers’ as well as in separate publications, the latest edition being produced in 2005.Footnote 12 Moreover, fragments of his work have repeatedly been seriously discussed, a second step towards nostalgia. Again and again his work has been mentioned in passing as ‘brilliant’, ‘serious’ or ‘incisive’. Racy, stammering, on the surface: his writings have retained a distinct flavour and they are still intense enough to cast a crystalline radiance over their readers. In this process of fascination and radiation, Kajai has become a myth of his own. He has been made the ‘father of Malay journalism’ (bapak kewartaan Melayu) and ‘father of Malay journalists’ (bapak wartawan Melayu), and that seems like an ultimate summary of nostalgia indeed: the man and his writings have been made an answer to readers' dissatisfaction with the present.
‘Father of journalists’Footnote 13 — it sounds like an order word, driven by this strange wish of giving journalists a family life. Abdul Rahim Kajai, who grew up largely fatherless, could have smiled about the metaphor and may have joked about it. Do we need a father? Do fathers not always fade away? Should fathers not be eliminated, sooner or later? And do fathers not have other fathers whose shadowy presence will break the confined family circle and destroy fatherly authority? Kajai in fact was the child of many other fathers, other newsmen before him, such as Abdullah Abdulkadir Munsyi, Syed Syekh al Hadi and, perhaps the most fatherly of them all, Mohd. Eunos Abdullah.Footnote 14
The sharp-witted coffee-drinker that he was, already in his lifetime Kajai must have been aware of the patriarchic myth that was being constructed around him by people close to him, colleagues and apprentices. Ishak Muhammad, Samad Ahmad, A. Samad Ismail, Othman Kalam, Ibrahim Yaakob, Muhammad Yusuf, Ahmad Bustamam, Zabha: they worked with him on their unsteady first steps into the world of public writing to become authoritative and respected writers on their own during and after the Emergency on the Peninsula — and they all sang ‘the old man's’ praises with melodies which were further emulated by Asas 50, the group of socially engaged Malay authors that mushroomed in Singapore and elsewhere in the early 1950s. ‘The position of Kajai in the midst of Malay society was like that of an artist whose performances in movies and on television and radio are admired’, Zabha was to write 40 years later by way of a summary of Kajai's service to the Malay nation. ‘The short stories and sketches which he wrote in Warta Malaya left a deep impression on the countless people who followed him, and his column about Wak Ketok in Utusan Zaman made an even deeper impression.’Footnote 15 In his later life Kajai was already shrouded in mystique, so it seems, and the nostalgic reminiscences of his ‘sons’ have merely deepened his authority in literary circles.Footnote 16
‘Journalist’ is usually translated as ‘wartawan’ and vice versa; the direct verbal connections of the two words suggest a differentiation in the character of the respective writing activities of these personae: a journalist is connected with ‘journal’ and he is supposed to work for a particular one, while a wartawan is associated with warta – ‘news’, ‘report’ – and can report news in every place, for every periodical. A wartawan is the man of tidings and reports rather than the man of a journal; he is a newsman, so to speak. This differentiation could serve as an indication of how Malay journalistic writing operated: not in terms of a journal with, by definition, its own distinct character and a distinct circle of readers, but in terms of news of the world, reports of local trials, and comments upon newsworthy meetings, which found a place on every available newspaper page, in between advertisements, letters of readers and tales.Footnote 17
Abdul Rahim Kajai was a wartawan, a newsman. He was moving from one periodical to another from the very beginnings of his writing career in the 1920s. These movements are telling not only of his capacities and the respect he commanded, but also of the fragmentary character of these papers: they were not driven by some more or less clearly defined ideology alone, but by commercial considerations as well. Malay periodicals offered information, opinions and comments, and they were a business; to be profitable, the demands and expectations of a publication's possible public should be aroused (and confirmed), for the benefit of all. On the energy of exhortations and confrontations, newspapers could make substantial contributions to the shaping of a public sphere, in which knowledge of the world, no matter how fragmentary and selective, would spread, ‘awakening and shaking off the apathy of the Malays towards progress’.Footnote 18
Malay papers were largely interchangeable in terms of content and even form, so it seems. In nostalgic retrospect, the authoritative ones were produced in Kuala Lumpur, Penang, and Singapore — the three large urban areas where Kajai was to work and live from 1928; his was the life of a traveller, and in daily life he had to deal with many non-Malays.Footnote 19 Their intended readership remained small but was slowly expanding: active Malay literates living in the urban areas and in the countryside.Footnote 20 The news that the papers offered was a mixture of information about local events and international issues, the latter usually taken over from British newspapers and news agencies. Increasingly ornamented with pictures and cartoons, they gave readers and listeners a certain awareness of the fact that they lived in a larger world than their village or neighbourhood or even sultanate alone. The sketches and tales, more or less playfully addressing concrete problems in daily life, should equally teach and incite readers and listeners to develop second thoughts about their lives and their ideas.Footnote 21 As one reads those writings from an ever-greater distance, a distinct timelessness is taking hold of these articles and tales about life in the Peninsula and beyond. As if they could have been repeated again and again; as if they could have been published in other periodicals as well; as if the discussions about a Malay identity would never be completed and would forever be hanging in the air; As if Malay communality were an open idea that everybody should discuss again and again, without ever reaching a conclusion.
In the strategy of most editors-in-chief, editorials and their generic complements, readers' letters, increasingly became the core of their product. More than the news and the tales, they were meant to invoke discussion and feelings of solidarity and togetherness among Malay readers and writers beyond the borders of each of the separate Malay States and Straits Settlements. Pinpricks they are, inspiring – another nostalgic observation – multifarious conversations about the grim situation in which the Malays were told to find themselves, both economically and culturally. Editorials and letters must have made readers and listeners realise that they and their families were Malays and should be proud of that name.Footnote 22
Read in hindsight, there is something uneasy about the papers' repetitive remarks about Malay misery and the repetitive messages about the need to intensify the efforts to glorify the word ‘Melayu’ and improve the situation in which the Malays found themselves. They were very Malay-centred, set in a tone of being wronged, be it selectively so: whereas they did find fault with Chinese or Kelings (a term used to refer to immigrant communities from certain parts of India) in more or less aggressive words on many occasions, the authority of either the British masters or their Malay aristocratic accomplices was never seriously challenged or questioned.Footnote 23 To formulate it in different terms, hardly ever did they even try to make Malay readers aware of the fact that they were in principle citizens (or subjects) of a plural, multicultural, multiethnic society, controlled by a foreign, colonising force. Or in still other terms, never were the Malays made aware that they not only had to strengthen themselves through education and assertive business activities, but also had to actively come to positive terms with the presence of the wide variety of ‘foreigners’ on the Peninsula, in the urban centres as well as in the countryside, by way of developing transethnic solidarities.Footnote 24 Those ‘others’ were there to stay, but Malay writers were not very willing to accept that simple fact; and rather than develop the prospect of possible integration, assimilation, or at least solidarity with ‘the others’, they concentrated their attention on their ‘own’ circles, tentatively formulating ideas of a hierarchy of ethnic or racial difference and one-sidedly exploring the dangers of pluralism, based on their ever louder claims for primary rights on the land, and supported by British colonial authorities.Footnote 25
This lack of openness, this unwillingness to actively play with notions of integration were to have far-reaching consequences for political and cultural life on the Peninsula after the Japanese period, up to this very day. Abdul Rahim Kajai certainly deserves (negative) mention in this connection: his writings played an important role in the formation of this racial or ethnic hierarchisation, and his papers addressed their Malay readers regularly and poignantly with notes about the Malay predicament, exhorting them to keep their imaginary backs straight, strengthen their Malayness and become more enterprising in a hostile environment. Malay writing of the 1930s, including Kajai's, tends to send its readers into exile and isolation in their own land, which they had to share with others.
Saudara, published by the Jelutong Press of the Muslim reformist Syed Syekh al-Hadi in Penang, was initially a weekly and later a bi-weekly, with a circulation that fluctuated between 1,000 and 1,500 during the time Kajai worked for it.Footnote 26 Operating in the spirit of Syed Syekh, he was aware from the start that his paper had to follow the ‘movements and changes that are thought to be useful for kaum, watan dan agama (family, nation and religion), that is to say: for the course which Saudara has given birth to and which it has been following until now’.Footnote 27 In particular, the editorials, the heart of every Malay newspaper, should raise the enthusiasm of the readers; they should be made like ‘very strong explosions, so that they will attract and draw the readers’ attention'.Footnote 28 The publications of the Jelutong Press were meant to admonish its public to actively confront the misery of Malay friends and families, inciting the believers to defend their interests in a rational and pragmatic manner. These admonitions were community focused and they addressed but indirectly ‘the others’, the ‘immigrants’, the ‘travellers’, the ‘foreigners’, in short the dagang. As if those others should not exist, so to speak — but then, this disregard of the presence of others made for a confusing stance: ‘our writing should be contested by the readers because the task of a newspaper is to change perceptions and attitude of readers’.Footnote 29
A similar adage steered Majlis in Kuala Lumpur, where Kajai moved after having worked in the shadow of Syed Syekh in Penang for a number of years. Samad Ahmad was to describe the paper later in yet another nostalgic retrospective comment:
A bowl for the smart and intelligent Malays who were vigilantly guiding their people so that they would move ahead as fast as possible in every field of life, following the currents of modern times … Moreover, this newspaper also brought to the fore thoughts and visions to defend and protect the rights of lordship of the Malay people over their own land and water, their homeland.Footnote 30
Warta Malaya, Kajai's next employer, was published with a similar focus on Malay interests and problems.Footnote 31 Under his leadership the paper grew to a circulation of over 2,500, and it set up two weeklies in its wake: Warta Ahad (some 3,000 copies) and Warta Jenaka (starting with 2,500).Footnote 32 Kajai wrote in a November 1938 editorial in a rhetorical mood: ‘Our intention of laying out the illnesses of the Malays is simple, most of all so that they will be given serious consideration by the government – and not just to inform her; the illnesses the Malays are suffering are no doubt well-known in government circles. We firmly believe that even the enemies of the Malays should by now know of our illnesses.’Footnote 33
Saudara, Majlis and Warta Malaya were financially supported by so-called Arab-Malays who, in the name of Islam, more or less actively shared the anxiety the papers expressed about the educational and economic backwardness of the Malays and their fear for a complete marginalisation or worse as a result of the activities of ‘Chinese’ and other ‘foreigners’. They sympathised with the attempts of Kajai and his colleagues at making Malays aware of the fact that they were being cornered, and inciting them to find ways to fight backwardness and subordination to ‘the others’ — but they also tried to make a profit from their publishing endeavours.Footnote 34 There is irony in the fact that Kajai was to become increasingly hostile to his own employers, accusing them of greed, selfishness and unreliability, calling them derogatorily DKK (Darah Keturunan Keling) and DKA (Darah Keturunan Arab), terms that were taken over by other Malay writers with a grim smile. These people were not real Malays.
In 1939 Abdul Rahim Kajai, by now a widely respected defender of the Malay cause, was appointed editor-in-chief of Utusan Melayu, a paper that was completely run and financed by self-proclaimed true and pure Malays (Melayu jati) and aimed at being the exclusive mouthpiece and printpiece of Malay interests. The paper, usually described in appropriate nostalgia as the highlight of Malay journalism before the arrival of the Japanese, carried the same name – Utusan Melayu – as a paper that had been published in Singapore for many years, established by Mohd. Eunos Abdullah in 1907. Echoes of both publications can be found in the Utusan Melayu in the present day, which still focuses on Malay issues above all else. Kajai's successful work for the novel newspaper – in 1941 it already had a circulation of 1,800 – may have turned him from a ‘newsman’ into a real ‘journalist’, and a special one at that.Footnote 35Utusan Melayu, that was Kajai, and that maxim holds in the description of budding journalism in many places: the newspaper becomes the man, and one particular person is the paper's point of gravitation.Footnote 36 Kajai and his friends managed to keep their paper independent from any organisation, also from the Kesatuan Melayu Muda, arguably the first political Malay association, set up by Ibrahim Ya'akob, who allegedly did not have close personal ties with the ‘father of Malay journalists’.Footnote 37
The Japanese period was a painful experience for Abdul Rahim Kajai right from the beginning. Accused of sympathy for the Kesatuan Melayu Muda, he was arrested and tortured by the military intelligence before being forced to accept the editorship of a new paper, sponsored and controlled by the new and unknown masters.Footnote 38 He did not know what to make of the new forms of censorship and propaganda. His writings suggest that he was fast losing his vitality and pugnacity, and ‘he did not understand the growing influence of Indonesian’.Footnote 39
Abdul Rahim Kajai was a ‘newsman’: he wrote commentaries and reports about events of the day, about the here and now. He was a writer: he composed editorials, translations and short sketches. He was an author: he created tales, short and long, which were published in a variety of periodicals. He was a wildly gesticulating speaker, spitting out his words. He was, in short, a public intellectual who wrote and spoke out about urgent issues in everyday life and tried to stimulate discussions and conversations. His handwriting was ‘not elegant, the form of his letters was big and rude, like scribbles’.Footnote 40 But then, a newsman is not only a writer, an author, a public intellectual, but also a human being who is born, grows up, has relationships and friendships, is driven by traumas and moments of bliss, develops certain skills and moves ahead until his heart stops beating. It is not only Abdul Rahim Kajai's writerly activities that are worthy of a long narrative; his personal life is as well, like everybody's life.
Abdul Latiff Abu Bakar's monograph on Kajai offers a large number of insights in his writerly work, and in defiance of its title page's subtitle – ‘Malay newsman and literature man’ – it also offers a number of intriguing glimpses into Abdul Rahim Kajai the man.Footnote 41 Inadvertently, the book reads almost like an autobiography; written as it is following the conventions of so many other autobiographies in Malay that were published in the twentieth century: it gives a very selective summary of some of his personal experiences and achievements and offers a large number of quotations embedded in a tale about the outward appearances of the main protagonist, his alliances and his enemies. These outward descriptions of personal connections are very relevant for attempts to make sense of the dynamics of early Malay newspapers. Their editors and writers – a distinction that is not always very clear – usually knew of each other, referred to each other's writings and, at times, criticised each other, probably no less for commercial than for ideological reasons: papers certainly had a message, but papers also had to sell – and discussions and polemics about the plight of the Malays and the possibilities of fighting to improve this plight were what counted in the late colonial days. However, the personal life behind these outward appearances and public achievements, the individual drives and pains, and even family life tend to remain shrouded in relative darkness. It seems as if there is in Malay writing a taboo on any analysis of personal motivations, unhappiness, obsessions, and inhibitions, let alone psychological speculation.
Abdul Latiff's book leaves many questions unanswered — or rather, it raises many questions, as every excellent book will do by definition, and it leaves room for another biography, one which should try to develop new methods of analysing Kajai's thinking and explaining his work on a personal level. It is tempting, for instance, to search for explanations of his so often snappy and short-tempered words in his busy life; the recurrent moves between the Peninsula and the Hejaz in his younger years; his largely fatherless upbringing; his movement around the Peninsula from Penang to Singapore to Kuala Lumpur and back again. It is also tempting to look for personal explanations for the apparent lack of correspondences between the adventures of his nomadic life and the adventures of the local protagonists in his tales and editorials. Repression? Sublimation? Imagination? What made Kajai tick, so to speak?
Could the sketchy pictures of the Malay countryside in Abdul Rahim Kajai's short stories perhaps be interpreted in terms of his longing for a life he had never experienced again after his youngest years? Are his descriptions of Malay misery and hardship based on personal experiences, or did he explore already conventional literary devices which were further emulated by later authors whose hearts and words were equally more or less inspired by their appreciation of misery in the Malay lands?Footnote 42 How to explain that his writerly evocations of the peaceful countryside were driven by nostalgia, evocations of something that never was? How to avoid conjectures about his frame of mind, naturally shifting and changing through time, on the basis of his public uneasy stance on the presence of all those foreigners — of the so-called Arabs and Keling on the Peninsula, for instance, people he must have been very familiar with? And how to account for his sympathy for the British colonial masters, people he appears to have respected from a distance? Or for his hostile ignorance, feigned or not, of the Chinese — people he had to deal with every day of his urban life after his definite return to the Peninsula in 1928, at an age when he himself may have been fully aware of the lack of stable roots and origins in his own life? Where did this urge to place people in different ethnic boxes come from? These are questions of a psychological character: whence his personal anxieties, why his respect, whereto his anger?
It is telling that the descriptions of Kajai's life and work so far have never explored his personal nostalgia, his animosities, his friendships, his intolerance and ignorance, while they pay so much attention to his increasing obsession with Malayness – takrif Melayu – and his exhortations in articles, editorials and short stories that Malays should develop themselves and stand firm amidst the waves of immigrants that were sweeping over the Peninsula, the Malay homeland. At times, these exhortations carry the almost socialist ring of an incipient societal analysis in terms of poverty, labour and class rather than privilege, race, primordialism and colonialism; however, sooner or later they, too, turn into evocations of a self-imposed communal or ethnic isolation. Like a frog under a coconut shell indeed, inspired by an apparent unwillingness or inability to develop a wider or comprehensive view of the clearly complex situation on the Peninsula where people of mutually differentiated ethnicities were struggling to find a place under the aegis of British authority, unable or unwilling to create a shared culture.
Kajai's statements about the state of things on the Peninsula remain conflicting and narrow, to say the least. They are hard to reconcile with his sharp intellect and his sharp pen, as are his trust in the British administration; his sympathy for the colonial masters and the Malay aristocracy;Footnote 43 his long-standing and intense experiences with ‘foreigners’ abroad and in the urban centres on the Peninsula; his fear, shared by the growing group of ‘real Malays’, of transgressing the laws and challenging those in power; his distrust of politics.Footnote 44 Roff makes an, as usual, brilliant assessment of the attitude of the Malay-educated intelligentsia in sentences which seem to perfectly apply to Kajai:
Rather than indulge in what seemed to be premature political action, most preferred to turn their attention to the self-strengthening of Malay society. Increasingly sensitive to Malay economic and educational backwardness, they nonetheless refused to accept the arguments of those (principally the religious reformists) who accused the traditional ruling class of neglecting the welfare of their subjects, and continued to look to that class for the determination as well as the safeguarding of Malay interests.Footnote 45
Roff's observation is a generalisation, and every generalisation contains an invitation to resistance, an admonition, that is, to persist in exploring particularities: a careful description of particular elements in the life of Abdul Rahim Kajai the man could be a first step towards writing about Kajai the writer in the same way as a generalisation about the Malay-educated intelligentsia. But then, such in-depth descriptions of the man are perhaps impossible or inconceivable, if only due to the lack of relevant materialsFootnote 46 — and so far, writing about the man has been unable to move beyond the occasional memorable testimony of his personal behaviour, mostly recalled in distant retrospect.
In the absence of concrete witnesses to Kajai's personal anxieties and inhibitions, such testimonies may suggest at least some non-causal connections between the man's personality and his writings and ideas, and hence give a certain depth and intimacy to them both — and they may be at least as tantalising as a closer look at the few photographs that are available of him. In particular, the reminiscences of some of his close friends and apprentices could serve as possible starting points in a narrative about Abdul Rahim Kajai's unfathomable personal drives and traumas, albeit with the caveat that he has become the subject of many moving and adoring recollections, which show that he was highly revered by the many men who worked with him. When reverence is shown, nostalgia is around the corner, close to inauthenticity.
As an adult, Abdul Rahim Kajai was an unusually tall man, a big man indeed, some six feet tall and rather stout, ventures Samad Ahmad, who worked with him at Majlis in Kuala Lumpur. He had a bright face and a little moustache. His front teeth were protruding, Samad adds rather sardonically, and his short-cut hair was somewhat curly.Footnote 47 His short hair was unkempt, claims Samad Ismail in his Memoir, and his long fingers were stained yellow by tobacco.Footnote 48 In his office he wore a white short-sleeved tee-shirt, a checked sarong tied with a belt, a collarless jacket and sandals; a black cap was always close at hand, and he used a revolving chair. He loved to use English, which he spoke with ‘an unusual accent’, and when he was talking, he waved his arms. Visitors to his office were numerous, ‘young Malays who were interested in politics and were concerned with the fate of nation and fatherland’ as well as ‘members of the secret service and the government who were performing certain tasks’.Footnote 49 And then there were the many female visitors whom Kajai warmly entertained with his jokes and tales ‘before they left, happy and excited’.Footnote 50 The offices of Majlis, Warta Malaya and Utusan Melayu must have looked and sounded like kampong (village) coffee shops indeed, with Kajai in his ‘traditional’ Malay costume – outward appearances count – as the radiant centre of attention.
Occasionally, Kajai had a fit of rage, particularly when he discovered print errors in his editorials; he could shriek and shout like nobody else, and ‘when he was really upset, he dropped his underpants’. Writing these editorials was a painful process; they made him ‘suffer’ every time. It started with a discussion about anything with whoever was around, and gradually Kajai warmed up, the veins on his forehead swelled up, saliva appeared around his mouth and he always wanted to win the wars of words he initiated. (‘Bad mouth, good heart’ [mulut jahat hati baik] is the proverb some of his young colleagues used to characterise him). Once he sat down behind his desk to write, spitting and coughing, drinking black coffee, smoking Ikan Mas cigarettes one after the other, he gazed into the distance, trying to think of a first sentence, which was a long time in the making, and many balls of paper found their way into the wastepaper basket. Eventually he went into a kind of trance, no longer aware of what was going on around him – he wrote with a pencil, which he held very loosely while it danced over the paper – until he was done. Then he read his writing aloud to everybody who wanted to listen, giving a smile and then another — and then he sent it to the printers.Footnote 51
Kajai was not the best teacher in his profession and not very understanding; occasionally he wrote an article about journalistic writing, but apparently he never discussed the acts of writing and editing with the young and aspiring newsmen around him.Footnote 52 He let them work in their own way, and rather than telling them in detail how (not) to write and edit, he showed by example how a newspaper should be operated, including the printing process.Footnote 53 Translations and articles were usually accepted in the form they were submitted, or else they were thrown into the wastepaper basket without comment.Footnote 54 He had close contacts with printers and setters – he himself had become an experienced setter in his young years – and was a very able organiser; in his days at Warta Malaya and Utusan Melayu he had full control over the nuts and bolts of publishing a newspaper, the work of the printers, and the activities of the young newsmen whom he sent out every morning after having read the latest papers, both Malay and English.Footnote 55.
Such descriptions suggest some personal peculiarities of Abdul Rahim Kajai the man, which could perhaps be woven into the contours of a psychological portrait. However, they are obviously coloured by nostalgia, and relying on them makes writing about him in the present an act of double nostalgia about a man who has become a myth. Perhaps there is nothing to do but accept that myth – stay away from a psychological analysis and depth. Resist speculation, just follow his writing – and respect the authority nostalgia has created.
Abdul Rahim Kajai's father was a Minangkabau man from a well-to-do religious family. As a young man, Salim Kajai travelled to Mecca for personal reasons that can only be guessed at; he settled there and became a Syekh, a person involved with guiding pilgrims and doing business.Footnote 56 He married a widow whom he brought back to her place of birth, Setapak, close to Kuala Lumpur where Abdul Rahim bin Salim Kajai was born in 1896, after his father had returned to Mecca. Abdul Rahim spent the first years of his life in Setapak, raised by his mother and grandmother, receiving a Malay education. Aged 12, he joined his father (who had married another woman) in Mecca, where he studied Arabic and religion; in 1909 he returned to the Peninsula where he worked as a typesetter, first in the Government Printing House in Kuala Lumpur and then at the Methodist Publishing House in Singapore, and later as a draughtsman in various semi-government offices in Kuala Lumpur. When Salim Kajai died in 1913, his son went back to Mecca to take over his business. In 1917 he came back to the Peninsula once again, and he found work as an administrator at a rubber company in Setapak. In 1920, he married Khalijah bt. Haji Salam, with whom he was to have six children. (Rumour has it that Kajai was a widower at the time, and that Khalijah was his second wife.) Soon after the wedding he returned to Mecca, this time with his wife, to take up the work of Syekh once again, occasionally writing a short piece about his experiences in the Holy Land for the periodicals Utusan Melayu and Lembaga Melayu, which were published in Singapore, and Idaran Zaman, which appeared in Penang.
When Kajai's mother died in 1928, he and his family moved back to the Peninsula again, and apparently he then decided to try to make a living from his work as a newsman and writer. He worked for Saudara, at that time a weekly published in Penang; in 1930, aged 36, he was appointed editor. The following year, he moved to Kuala Lumpur to take up the position of editor of the bi-weekly Majlis, where he worked until the beginning of 1935. Apparently respected for his multifarious tongue, his sharp pen, his commitment to being a newsman and his organising abilities, he was then appointed writer of the daily Warta Malaya, and before long he was the editor of its weeklies Warta Ahad and Warta Jenaka as well, operating first in Kuala Lumpur and later in Singapore. He himself was to recall the years at Warta Malaya as ‘the best years of my life’.Footnote 57 In 1939 he took up the position of editor-in-chief of Utusan Melayu, ‘the first national Malay newspaper’, which had its offices in Singapore, and soon after its establishment started two more publications, Utusan Zaman and Mastika, in which Kajai was actively involved as well.Footnote 58 After the Japanese invasion, Abdul Rahim Kajai moved back to Kuala Lumpur again, where he was made the editor of Perubahan Baharu, only to return to Singapore to take up the position of editor-in-chief of the Japanese-sponsored Berita Malai. On 5 December 1943, he died of heart failure.
In the short story of his life which he wrote in English for the Japanese, Kajai presented himself as a real Malay ‘of pure Malai parentage’, and that is an interesting claim, given the fact that his father came from the Minangkabau area.Footnote 59 Obviously he was not a Malay in the sense that British administrators preferred to picture the Malays as being — living the tranquil and simple life of farmers in villages in the countryside on the Peninsula with a deep respect for ancestors and traditional leaders, acting like courteous and wise gentlemen, accepting hierarchy and order.Footnote 60 Nor did he fit the typical description of the Malays as the main protagonists in narratives about a distant world of ancient subsistence-oriented kampong communities whose lethargic inhabitants are content with their traditional leaders, ultimately Sultans and ulamas (Muslim scholars), remaining far away from the urban centres and relatively untouched by ‘modern life’.
The basis for these pastoral pictures and romantic descriptions had been laid at the beginning of the nineteenth century by Sir Stamford Raffles, who experienced the Malays as courteous and kind people, living a peaceful and slow-paced life in rural communities reminiscent of life in England in days of yore. That picture, repeatedly brushed up, guided British interventions in the early twentieth century, when the colonial masters began to effectively coordinate their control over daily affairs in the increasingly multiethnic Peninsula.Footnote 61 They tried to formulate a policy whereby so-called Malays, farmers most of them, were to be excluded (if not protected) from the rapidly developing export economy as well as from an active engagement in wage labour and entrepreneurship. For the sake of stability and peace, their traditions, including their loyalty to the Sultans and Muslim scholars, were to be preserved, and they were to be given the opportunity to keep on living the way their ancestors had allegedly lived.Footnote 62
In the framework of British policy, local people were gradually made to realise that they could make the oldest claims on the land and should, accordingly, be treated with sheltering respect. These claims were expressed by self-proclaimed Malays, Kajai among them, who wanted to see the rights and privileges of the ‘soil-children’ (bumiputera) defended, and told themselves to stand firm amidst the growing stream of immigrants whom they felt entitled to call ‘foreigners’, ‘outsiders’ or ‘immigrants’, depending on the context. Theirs was an ethnic or ethnicised nationalism that focused on their own group's culture and traditions rather than a civic nationalism that would have accepted the multiplicity and diversity on the Peninsula and would have created notions of solidarity and community that went beyond their own Malay-speaking group.Footnote 63 This emphasis on ethnicity rather than civility became a leading feature in discussions among Malays.Footnote 64 In nostalgic present-day retrospect Kajai tends to be given a very prominent role in this Malay struggle for ethnic superiority: Malays, the original and indigenous population, should have special rights of ownership over the Peninsula. Theirs should be a privileged place but for the time being it was still a place of poverty, as Za'ba so eloquently observed in the early 1920s, in yet another essay that is strong enough to make its echoes very well audible until the present day:Footnote 65
The Malays, as a whole, are a particularly poor people. Poverty is their most outstanding characteristic and their greatest handicap in the race of progress. Poor in money, poor in education, poor in intellectual equipment and moral qualities, they cannot be otherwise but left behind in the march of nations … The poverty of the Malays is an all-round poverty. It envelops them on every side … They are not, however, naturally of poor intellect, or incapable of high morals. Potentially, they possess such qualities as much as do other people. But the actualized part of this potentiality is still too poor to bear comparison with what we find in other progressive people in this country. Intellectually, the Malays are poor in knowledge, in culture, and in the general means of cultivating the mind. Their literature is poor and unelevating; their domestic surroundings from childhood are poor and seldom edifying; their outlook on life is poor and full of gloom; their religious life and practice is poor and far removed from the pure original teachings of the Prophet.Footnote 66
‘Poverty’ and ‘gloom’ — those words were, in Za'ba's view, no doubt confirmed by the facts, and they were to become winged facts that galvanised many Malays, ‘real’ and self-proclaimed, in their angry outcries at social injustice and backwardness, calling for policies that should protect the Malay communities in the peninsular sultanates and ultimately bring each and every Malay on the Peninsula together, drowning out the calls of other communities to be more actively involved in political and administrative life.
Za'ba addressed the British as much as those who were becoming aware that they should call themselves ‘Melayu’; for the latter his essay was also published in a Malay translation. His words served the British well in their pursuit of policies aimed at building up the framework of a plural society in which contacts between members of the various ethnicities, each in its own rather clearly delineated field of economic activities, were to be restricted as much as possible to the market place only. If Malay interests and rights were effectively protected, a ‘vigorous and self-respecting agricultural peasantry’ would be created, as Sir Richard Winstedt, one of the architects of British colonial policy on the Peninsula formulated it, largely under the guidance of the Sultans in each of the states separately.Footnote 67 In the meantime, phrases about Malay ‘poverty’ and ‘gloom’, used again and again, acquired a rhetorical flavour — easily available and easily manipulated, not only because they seemed to reflect and confirm newly discovered facts of peninsular life but also because they emulated conventional phrases in Malay performances which, since days immemorial, had been driven by phrases of loss and failure, experiences of travellers and storytellers alike. ‘Poverty’, ‘loneliness’ and ‘misery’ have been closely interconnected notions in Malay writing. In combination, they have had a very resilient existence in the tales Malays have liked to tell each other since time immemorial until the present day, creating an extensive series of complaints which writers such as Kajai eagerly took up.
Poor and cornered: those were the Malays Kajai conjured up in his newsman activities, and he made it clear that their condition could be improved. Some 15 years after Za'ba's cool statement, Kajai wrote in the weekly Utusan Zaman, run by pure Malays:
The Malay race (bangsa) at present seems seriously sick; and although it has succumbed, it may not yet be dead and therefore it is not impossible that it will rise in the future with the help of God the Lord of All. The race is drowning, its language is disappearing, its soul is almost gone, and its spirit has been adrift for a thousand years; that is how its identity is almost completely adrift as well, because it has been knocked over by people of foreign blood who are hiding within the race as tigers hide in a flock of goats. However, now the Malay race has begun to develop new steps to clean up its identity so that it will stand on its own feet and its movements will be clean and honest. Foreigners have tried to poison the Malay identity by making shameful use of Allah's phrases and slandering the Malay movement as if it were a communist movement and now they are also trying to confuse the ideas concerning bangsa in terms of ancestry (‘race’) and bangsa in terms of subjects (‘nationality’).Footnote 68
In great problems: those are the Malays Kajai tends to put on the stage of his tales, written in that brilliantly jagged and stammering style of his — and then these paper Malays manage to solve some of these problems by resolute actions and cleanups. Echoing Za'ba's words as much as repeating British images, the descriptions of a problematic life in Malay communities – guarded by more or less wise, compassionate and courageous leaders, in countryside and city alike – are illustrated by descriptions of individual problems of poverty, backwardness and depression that sooner or later may be overcome. Just like his reports and editorials, most of Kajai's tales read like attempts at restoring pastoral tranquility and prosperity (be it with a modernising difference), thus serving readers and listeners as advice on how to operate in real life. Interestingly enough, however, these suggestions of restorable tranquility appear to be inspired more by cultural emotions than by clear thoughts about economy, law and politics: terms such as ‘surplus’, ‘labour’, ‘law’, ‘profit’, ‘demand and supply’, ‘productivity’, ‘capital’ are rarely used, let alone explored, and even terms such as syarikat (‘corporation’) and perniagaan (‘business’) are given a communal sense rather than a political or economic one.Footnote 69 Kajai's counsel is of a performative character; it defies careful analysis.
Abdul Rahim Kajai himself was obviously a traveller, a wanderer. It should perhaps come as no surprise that he did not just write about the world he knew best: the cities, cosmopolitan by definition, with the innumerable shocks and stimuli that may have made him realise that ‘real life’ and ‘deep experience’ were to be found elsewhere. He too was longing, so it seems, for the village life he largely knew from tales alone, and his own tales focus on the tranquility of the Malay countryside, of kampong life, where his own constantly shocked life would find some kind of peace. Tranquility can be deceptive — and it has to be defended.
British dreams and designs notwithstanding, the countryside, at once peaceful and disjointed, was not the only place where ‘Malays’ found themselves. If anything is confusing about the discussions that raged on the Peninsula, it is the question of who could be counted as ‘the real Malays’, Melayu jati. Who could call themselves Malays? Who should be protected and given preferential treatment? ‘Melayu’ was hard to define, let alone to describe, and Kajai realised that all too well. The word was to refer, so it seems, to an ever widening group of people who were given – or rather claimed – the name of Melayu, primarily the result of their contacts with ‘the others’.Footnote 70 Notions of ‘Malayness’ (takrif Melayu) were developed in more or less direct cooperation with the colonial masters — and as proofs of their own uncertainties, Malay writing in newspapers and stories in the 1930s shows in abundance that these ‘Malays’ themselves could not agree on a clear-cut definition until the very end of the British rule. Also the definition which the Persatuan Melayu Selangor (Union of Selangor Malays, of which Kajai was an active member) came up with in 1940 did not go undisputed after decades of discussions which had made ‘Malay nationalism’ the power-that-be on the Peninsula, of central importance in the as yet unknown end of colonial supervision: ‘He who is considered Melayu is a person who claims descent from his father who originated from the Malay Pensinula and speaks the Malay language or one of the languages in the Malay Archipelago and practices the Malay adat [custom] as well as being a Muslim.’Footnote 71 A similar fate – and more discussions – befell the definition of an English-speaking and well-respected Malay administrator around the same time: ‘a Malay is a man whose male parent is a native of this Malay Peninsula or of any of the neighbouring islands of the Malay archipelago’.Footnote 72
Such definitions were thought to be unsatisfactory like all the others before and after, due to their rhetorical simplicity as well as their crippling comprehension. They were at once telling and questionable: telling in their emphasis on the wishful exclusiveness of the ‘natives’ and questionable in their emphasis on patrilinearity and patriarchy. Moreover, what exactly was Malay adat? Even more questionable were the definitions that included the people who, originating from the islands East and Southeast of the Peninsula, were willing to assimilate and allegedly learnt some form of Malay in the process.Footnote 73
Presenting Malays as the original people, as the ‘natives’ of the Peninsula implies a dismissive differentiation from those who in the 1930s were referred to as ‘foreigners’, ‘others’, ‘immigrants’, ‘not indigenous’, even those whose fathers and forefathers had lived in the Peninsula for several generations and took it for granted they were going to stay ‘here’ with their children for good. They did not speak Malay as their first language, they were not Muslims, they tried to abide by ancestral customs that connected them with their ancestral lands of origin, and they did not show much sympathy for the Sultans, who were ruling in the shadow of the British colonisers. Up to an indefinite point, this differentiation also pertained to alternative Malay movements, the world of more or less Malay-speaking Muslims who were not tied to the land, did not revere the Sultans and did not comply with the picture of pastoral life: the world of mobile merchants, cash croppers, land speculators, peons, travelling students and religious teachers who, lacking a strong loyalty to local rulers and ‘home’, explored rationalistic, reformist, modernist and universalistic elements in Islamic teaching instead of living the life of farmers and following the rules of their forefathers, called ‘tradition’ or adat.
These people were in search of commercial opportunities, new chances of making a living, and religious knowledge beyond pastoral life; their search for a shared identity seems aptly summarised in the adventures of Anak Mat Lela Gila in Ishak Muhammad's tale of the same name as well as in the narratives about Ishak Muhammad himself, a close ally of Kajai's.Footnote 74 Many of these ‘others’ – more adventurous, more open, more flexible – had their origins in the frontier regions of the Peninsula and the less densely populated parts of the Indies rather than in China and India, and they were perhaps more Melayu because they were more willing to adjust to the daily life of the self-proclaimed children of the soil (bumiputera) than those ‘Chinese’ and ‘Indians’. (The term ‘bumiputera’ is a linguistic anomaly and therefore memorable: ‘soilson’ or even ‘soil of the son’ would be the most ‘parallel’ translation.). Abdul Rahim Kajai himself was one such ‘other’ Malay, so to speak: his father had his origins in the Minangkabau region as much as in the Arab Peninsula, and Kajai himself was a true wanderer in his life and in his writings, always in search of new opportunities and an identity, in various places, in various positions.
In his writings, Abdul Rahim Kajai appears fully aware of the confusions over the definition of ‘Malayness’ and ‘Malays’; witness the nebulous ways he uses ‘takrif Melayu’ (Malay identity, Malayness) and ‘Melayu jati’ (true Malay). Nebulous or not, British ideas about difference between ethnic groups were becoming part and parcel of popular thought on the Peninsula, and Kajai clearly played into the growing awareness of these differences, even though he kept on struggling with definitions, just like the British.Footnote 75 At the same time, however, he clearly kept a respectful distance from the white masters: the British should act like a protective umbrella rather than like active participants in his efforts at Malay self-identification.
The search for a communal identity easily leads to nostalgia and tradition, the effort of creating memories of the past rather than expectations for the future. However, Kajai's writings show in abundance how fickle and brittle nostalgia and tradition can be. Different from the strongly historical interest of the British masters and the Malay aristocracy, his tales, columns and editorials do not invoke the Malay past, glorious by definition; instead, they focus on the present – a kind of nostalgia for the contemporary – in that they exhort the ‘Malays’ to improve their present-day situation of poverty and misery on ‘their’ Peninsula. They do so from a very limited Malay point of view, ignoring the fact that the so-called Chinese and Indians as well as the DKA and the DKK – no longer sojourners, newcomers or immigrants but inhabitants – are there to stay. His words are certainly not inspired by pragmatism and realism alone, and perhaps consistent in his approach, yet problematic if not contradictory in retrospect is his silent support of the aristocratic elite who, in close cooperation with the British-led administration, did not do very much to guide their subjects from their alleged backwardness and seemed more interested in entertaining good contacts with these ‘foreigners’ and ‘aliens’ for their own material benefit than in helping their own ‘subjects’ to confront their poverty.Footnote 76
Abdul Rahim Kajai obviously had no consistent ideology or political philosophy beyond some basic principles — limited on purpose, elaborated on the force of emotion, again and again. His writings are performative rather than constative, above all motivated, so it seems, by the desire to make discussion possible and activities conceivable, in a form of Malay that he himself never problematised or analysed.Footnote 77 His writings produced conversation and suggested action, circling around the possibility of an exclusive Malay communalism comprising the Malays in the various states that made up the Peninsula rather than around the desirability of forming a comprehensive or coherent peninsular society. They tried to create a shared, vibrant identity, inspired by the image of homogeneous and stable subsistence-oriented communities with strong loyalties to sage leaders and an actively experienced Islam, performed on the soil that had been owned by their ancestors since time immemorial. These calls for an exclusive communalism may have been commercially and spiritually rewarding; they were not very realistic — and it is telling that the reach of distinct keywords in Kajai's publications, such as bangsa (‘race’), watan (‘nation’), ummat (‘the people’), gerak (‘movement’), kaum (‘family’), tanah air (‘territorial area’), negeri (‘land’), kerajaan (‘government’) and maju (‘prosperous’), remained multiple, escaping clearly defined meanings;Footnote 78 even in the Utusan Melayu, that ‘truly Malay newspaper’, established in 1939; even in the tales he began to write in 1936. His writings lacked a core. His words were dancing — and they still do.
In 1930–31 Abdul Rahim Kajai published Cerita Dzu'l-Ruhain, an adaptation of an Arab novel about Turkey, in the series Angan2 Kehidupan, one of the many initiatives of Syed Syekh al-Hadi's Jelutong Press which disseminated relatively cheap reading materials – periodicals as well as books – among the growing group of Malay literates on Penang and beyond. Syed Syekh (and his press) were inspired by reformist and modernist ideas about Muslim life: daily life should be based on a rational interpretation of Islamic teachings which should guide one towards social action that would benefit individuals as well as the community of Muslims as a whole. Such action should benefit, more particularly, the Malay communities on the Peninsula which found themselves in a growing crisis, both culturally and economically, due to the activities of ‘the others’, including the British administration and its locally born accomplices.Footnote 79 It seems safe to assume that Kajai composed his Cerita Dzu'l-Ruhain on the more or less direct inspiration of Syed Syekh's own Hikayat Faridah Anom, a tale located in Egypt which was written, says its introduction, ‘to give (readers) appropriate teachings for the benefit of their people and their homeland’. Hikayat Faridah Anom is also an adaptation of an Arab novel (or a combination of a number of tales), and it is also about people living in the Muslim world far away, in a kind of never-never land where Muslims do things differently — in ways, that is, which could serve Malays as examples of how they themselves could act and think.Footnote 80 Many Malay tales set in the Muslim Middle East had preceded these two stories published in Penang, and many were to follow. In terms of their topic, they all could be read as representative of a distinct genre in Malay writing: tales about life in the Muslim heartland, curious mirror-like variants on the so-called Orientalist fantasies that were produced in Europe.
Hikayat Faridah Anom was a bestseller and was reprinted more than once before the Japanese invasion; it has been given a central place in the canon of modern Malay writing — and Syed Syekh was to write a number of other tales before his death in 1934. Cerita Dzu'l-Ruhain, published in three volumes, was a commercial failure, and Kajai must have concluded that he should never use his pencil again to scribble another ‘novel’ about that dream-like Muslim world far away. Writing such long and, by definition, intricate narratives was obviously off his beat; his intensive work for newspapers and periodicals, focused on the contemporary Peninsula alone, led him to develop a distinct style, a novel form of telling tales. This form was different and distinct, and very effective at that: his articles and editorials drew the attention of Malay readers, and he managed to cultivate his own ways of giving Muslim readers appropriate teachings for the benefit of their people and their homeland, in the spirit of Syed Syekh al-Hadi. Short, pointed, fragmentary, acid, and composed with a constantly shifting focus and voice — good for recitation.
Kajai perhaps became best known for his sketches of Malay daily life, columns which, composed around the fictional characters of Pak Lacok (in Warta Jenaka) and Wak Ketok (in Utusan Zaman), criticise the Malays, their lethargy, their follies, their overacting and their dangerous passion for modern (urban) fashions, as well as the Arab-Malays, invariably (and painfully) pictured as vain, shrewd and greedy.Footnote 81 The sketch-like tales – the ones about Wak Ketok were illustrated by cartoons of Ali Sanat who pictured him as an almost-Javanese man, a variant upon Petruk, one of the ‘clown’ figures in the Javanese shadow play – must have reminded readers of the usually humorous anecdotes about Pak Pandir, Si Luncai and other numbskulls, either shrewd or smart, depending on the occasion. They were written variants, so to speak, of the short tales, including interesting proverbs, aphorisms and poems (pantun), which people in the Peninsula used to tell to each other for entertainment and counsel. In the adventures of Wak Ketok in particular, Kajai's counsel for Malay readers was clear enough: get your act together and be very cautious in your dealings with those Arab-Malays, the DKA, and those Keling-Malays, the DKK.
Kajai took up writing tales again in 1936, with a story entitled ‘Awang Budiman’, published in Warta Jenaka. These were the years when stories found their way in growing numbers into Malay periodicals everywhere on the Peninsula.Footnote 82 Following and reinforcing the wave of these publications, Kajai was to write another 47 longer and shorter tales during the years until the arrival of the Japanese.Footnote 83 All of them were first published in the periodicals he himself edited, sometimes in the form of a serial; many of them were included in later collections of his work, first in Jawi and later also in Romanised form.Footnote 84
Of course it is possible to make some comprehensive statements about these 48 tales by addressing a set of conventional questions of signification — only to be confronted with individual exceptions and differences. Kajai's tales deal with Malay life on the Peninsula in the 1930s — with the present, that is, which lasts as long as the tale lasts. Events are organised around a love affair. The endings dwindle: people tend to delay their death and they do not live happily ever after or before. The beginnings are abrupt: the telling starts with a bang, somewhere in the middle, an arbitrarily chosen event. The narratives are driven by surprise rather than by suspense, by the quirky movement to the next event or conversation rather than by the gradual revelation of a secret. The sentences move forwards rather than inwards, suggesting speed rather than anxiety, surface rather than depth; themes are multiple, only touched upon in passing. Descriptive intensity is lacking; sociological, economic, psychological and even cultural explorations are thin. Things happen because they happen, and it seems as if the words are not meant to leave any trace but the occasional memory of a playful phrase or two that, counsel-like, may confirm a proverb or strengthen a personal experience.Footnote 85 The presentation of events and scenes is racy, stammering and faltering. The characterisation of protagonists is devious and guileful, while their actions are unpredictable and unconventional; black and white are inconceivable words in Kajai's realistic world.
In short, Kajai's tales are far from self-contained wholes in which the presentation of events and persons can be elegantly interrelated and interconnected to form the coherent and dense interpretation that gives every element a proper place. Instead, these are fragmentary series of scenes, very loosely connected, if connected at all: at times, the narrative logic seems hidden from the narrators (and the author) themselves. The story line is not easy to follow in terms of a conventional sequence of events, the more so because the final words do not come to a conclusion from which the preceding events can be given sense. Instead, the narratives fan out in all directions, so to speak, and even the advice or counsel that they seem to carry is visible only in a flash or two, in between the racing movements of the balls in a pinball machine that leave it to their players to take control over the words in terms of their daily lives.
Kajai's tales invite poaching rather than analysis, and in their sparkling energy they resist the efforts of making comprehensive sense of Malay writing. That is what makes them so fascinating even now: coherent interpretations will be resisted in the process of reading. If anything, they read like a series of reports in a newspaper, in the ‘human interest’ section, their strength being in the unpredictable recognisability of the constituent elements separately — and recognisability is by definition a matter of poaching rather than arrangement, of fragmentary signification rather than coherent comprehension.
Obviously a certain development can be detected in the 48 tales Kajai published over a period of some seven years. Reading through them in chronological order, it seems as if he tried to expand his writing techniques while extending the narrative's length — and do not all Malay writers try to become authors by writing novels, tales that, as more or less coherent narratives about a community of people, could be read as allegories of the ‘nation’? Cerita Awang Putat (The tale of Awang Putat) is the story that stands on the borderline between tale and novel in terms of length as well as composition: in none of Kajai's longer short stories do the contradictory pulls towards coherence and unpredictability seem stronger.Footnote 86
The tale of Awang Putat first appeared in the weekly Utusan Zaman, symbol of Melayu energy and showpiece of Malay self-reliance; in Kajai's terms, it is another story that suggests how Malays can stand on their own feet by reinforcing their own style of life and confronting foreigners by making them flee.Footnote 87 In fact, it almost reads like a manual. Cerita Awang Putat has a conventional beginning: a peaceful description of the environment in which actions and events are going to take place — the perfect beginning of a novel.Footnote 88 The ending, by contrast, is uneasy: the main protagonists die unhappy and separated, and the village is still in the process of reformulating the conditions of tranquility and prosperity — the ragged and sudden ending of a short story.Footnote 89
Cerita Awang Putih is the tale of Tenong, a Malay community on a river, not far from Temerloh, in the heartland of Pahang.Footnote 90 Farmers are living in prosperous harmony, the result of good prices for rice and rubber as much as of decent piety. Pastoral tranquility is disrupted by the arrival of a Jawi Pekan (Indian Malay) from Penang who becomes the headmaster of the newly founded school; his brother, who becomes the manager of the mosque; and a Chinese who opens a shop. In close cooperation with the most prominent village leaders, the three men gradually take control over daily life in Tenong, designing a series of devious schemes, yet somehow protected by the Law. The village boys are forced to go to school; a road is constructed; villagers begin to purchase shoes, bikes and trousers, symbols of modern times (kemodenan); the Chinese shop expands and becomes the village's social and commercial centre; villagers run into debt and are forced to mortgage their land; the fields of rice and vegetables turn into bushes; pigs are running around; some people decide to leave; and the mosque is no longer the centre of communal life.
The hero of the story, farmer's son Awang Putat, watches the disintegration of his village community (pergaulan kampung) with ever-growing discomfort and anxiety.Footnote 91 His heart is broken when the object of his secret love, Cik Teh, marries the schoolmaster's brother, and then he develops strategies to hurt those who are hurting him. He becomes the leader of a gang of Malay youngsters: ‘the children of useless people in the village who do nothing but bring trouble to their parents. They sleep during the day, and are awake at night, gambling and getting into mischief upstream and downstream so that everybody hates them.’ This gang more or less successfully disrupts the rapidly expanding Chinese presence in the village. Awang Putat opens his own shop, which successfully competes with the Chinese, but then it is burnt down. He sets up another shop a little further upstream, and then the Chinese shop (including securities and banknotes) is burnt down, totally ruining its owner.
Awang Putat initiates an affair with the married Cik Teh, pretending that he still loves her; her husband begins to feel uneasy and rapes his wife's sister.Footnote 92 Cik Teh forces her husband into a divorce, but she is rejected by Awang Putat — with the words ‘I only wanted to cheat you because I wanted to take revenge for what you did to me.’ Out of anger as much as out of love for Awang Putat, Cik Teh kills her husband and is sent to jail. When she comes back to Tenong, she on her turn rejects Awang Putat, telling him that she has concluded that he ‘has not treated her properly’; she has become a good Muslim and has made the promise to sacrifice herself for the good of ‘our beloved village’, just as he did.Footnote 93 In the end, Arabs and Chinese have left the village, and the mosque is restored in its former glory and authority. Awang Putat becomes a respected man, while Cik Teh becomes a devoted teacher. Neither gets married, and they meet once a year; meanwhile the prosperity and tranquility of Tenong are trying to find ‘modern’ forms. Some 25 years later, first Awang Putat and then Cik Teh die; they are laid to rest next to each other, and their graves become a place of pilgrimage.
Cerita Awang Putat shines like a realistic tale, presenting a series of easily recognisable scenes and events of daily life in the Malay countryside in modern times, including a crash course in the village economy, clear expositions of the moral shortcomings of the immigrants, and warnings about the dangers that threaten the Malay way of life. It does so in words and sentences that steer readers time and again to newspaper reports, equally fragmentary and piecemeal in terms of topics and events, including killings, fires, trials, gangs, love affairs and economic hardships. The narrative seems to stammer ahead in devious ways – strange sentences, unconventional actions, strong discontinuities, hilarious comparisons, proverbs, counsel and wisecracks – driven by this strong dreamlike search for Malay superiority and privileged isolation. Kajai's tale reads, in short, like an allegory of Malay pastoral life, including the tumultuous intrusions by foreigners who are effectively dealt with by the criminal acts of the hero and his Malay friends, ever moving forwards to an open ending, past and future at once: modernity cannot be evaded but it should. And death awaits us all.
Reading the tale of Awang Putat also leads to thoughts of nostalgia. The glorious and memorable images of Malay tranquility and self-reliance are obstructed by thoughts of the Malay reality of cries and whispers. Cerita Awang Putat is, in retrospect, just a shiny example of the radiance which is circulating around the crystal of Abdul Rahim Kajai's writing, its core as ungraspable as ever.
