Land beneath the Wind:
Writing from Malaysia

Series Editor Frank Stewart.
Guest Editors K.S. Maniam and Daizal Rafeek Samart.

The summer 1999 issue features a collection of new writing in English from Malaysia, guest-edited by K.S. Maniam and Daizal Rafeek Samad.

Focusing on Malaysia, this feature includes poetry by Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Dina Zaman, Salleh Ben Joned, Ee Tiang Hong, and Wong Phui Nam; fiction by K. S. Maniam, Mulaika Hijjas, Lloyd Fernando, and Lee Kok Liang; and an interview with Wong Phui Nam.

Also in this issue is “Searching for Che and the Perfect Buddha,” a symposium on travel and writing that includes Terry Caesar, Diane Ackerman, Thomas Farber, Edward Hoagland, James D. Houston, Marilyn Krysl, Christopher Merrill, Charlotte Painter, Tom Montgomery-Fate, Nancy Lord, David Rains Wallace, and Tony Whedon.

Additional piecees include essays by Leonard Nathan, Phil Choi, Steve Heller, and Hawai‘i writer D. Mahealani Dudoit; fiction by Sharon May Brown and Jerry Whitus; reviews of such books as Let’s Eat Starsby Nanao Sakaki, Luzonby Malcolm Champlin and Steven Goldsberry, and The Shores of a Dream: Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s Early Work in Americaby Jane Myers and Tom Wolf; and a portfolio of photographs by Linda Connor.

About the guest editors: K. S. Maniam is the author of the novels The Return and In a Far Country and the short-story collections Arriving and Other Stories and Haunting the Tiger: Contemporary Stories from Malaysia. He has also written two plays: The Cord and The Sandpit. “We Make It to the Capital” is from Haunting the Tiger; and “All I Had” is from Delayed Passage, a novel in progress.

Daizal Rafeek Samad has written many scholarly articles on world literature, and last year was commissioned to write a book on Malaysian literature in English. He is also working on a book of short stories and a novel. Whisper Stars, a book of poems, is forthcoming.

Extracts

“The waves, grown enormous in the dark, struck the boat. The machinery of effort and fear fell into an unresisting drift. A steady rain wet us; we remained a loose knot at the bow. Nothing was visible beyond the prow; the sea was a seething white. Phosphorescent gleams leered at us like crab eyes and then subsided, only to rise again. We, unwilled, were trapped within perfect riot: rain, dismantling haze, swinging indirection. Zain and Ahmad looked at us for a moment, frightened, then lay down under the loose oars. The boat swung from darkness to darkness like an unmothered cradle.

   Sallahudin retched violently. ‘I can’t take this!’ he gasped.

   ‘Let’s do something,’ Donald said.

   But he only rocked the boat more—a spill of water froze us—when he groped towards the oars.

    ‘Mamma mia!’Uncle Tom cried.

   We sat still, wearing out the fear.

   Zain and Ahmad talked in Malay under the oars as if safe in the womb of their home.

   ‘Have you been to Kuala Lumpur?’ Zain asked.

   ‘You know I haven’t even gone to Alor Setar,’ Ahmad replied.

   ‘You’ve got to go on a train. It moves, chuk-chuk, chuk-chuk, through many stations. Cuts through day and night. And then the capital!’

   ‘Have you been there?’

   ‘Seen only fish, boat, sand, and sea. But we can go.’

   ‘When?’

   ‘Anytime you want.’

   Ahmad laughed, a tiny piping sound against the massed roar of the waves. He could not control himself; Zain joined him. The boat struck the waves as the two rolled from side to side, utterly defiant. Our grim, frustration-set faces relaxed. The furious waves might have been bunched, cascading paper, swirling under a freak wind.”
—from “We Make It to the Capital” by K. S. Maniam

216 pp., summer 1999 (11:1), $20
ISBN 978-0-8248-2200-5
JSTOR