Journal of Intercultural Studies

ISSN: 0725-6868 (Print) 1469-9540 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjis20

Rindu Rustic: Singapore Nostalgias in Modern

Malay Prose

Bahrawi Nazry

To cite this article: Bahrawi Nazry (2019) Rindu Rustic: Singapore Nostalgias in Modern Malay
Prose, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 40:4, 504-520

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/07256868.2019.1628722

Published online: 04 Jul 2019.

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JOURNAL OF INTERCULTURAL STUDIES
2019, VOL. 40, NO. 4, 504–520
https://doi.org/10.1080/07256868.2019.1628722

Rindu Rustic: Singapore Nostalgias in Modern Malay Prose*

Nazry Bahrawi
Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore, Singapore

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Inspired by Walter Mignolo’s call to decolonise knowledge, this Nostalgia; decoloniality; The
article reassesses the universal applicability of Sveltana Boym’s Singapore Story; Malay
celebrated theory of nostalgia unto contexts outside of post- literature; Singapore
literature
communist Slavic cultures. It extends the Malaysian anthropologist
Wazir Jahan Karim’s study of emotions in Malay culture into the
literary sphere to outline a distinctive form of nostalgia in
contemporary literary prose written by Malay Singaporean authors
that can be read as disrupting the official Singapore story of
unbridled progress. Focusing on selected works by Suratman
Markasan and Mohamed Latiff Mohamed, it identifies an angst-
ridden form nostalgic trope that it calls rindu rustic, or rustic
longing, which laments the loss of kampong life in Singapore.
Comparisons are then drawn to the rustic longing expressed in
the Singapore-set works of Malay Malaysian authors, Abdul Samad
Ismail and Abdul Samad Said, to delineate differences borne out
of national consciousness across both sides of the Causeway.
Lastly, it argues that the rindu rustic of the Malay Singaporean
authors can be figured as a distinctive form of nostalgia peculiar
to Singapore that draws from the features of Boym’s two
conceptions of nostalgia, restorative and reflective, and critiques
Chua Beng Huat’s theory of Singapore’s reassuring nostalgia for
the kampong.

Introduction
The grand narrative of Singapore’s nationhood imagines it as a country driven by the sur-
vivalist need, or an insatiable hunger if we read between the lines, for progress. This teleo-
logical ethos is arguably most succinctly expressed through the title of its founding prime
minister Lee Kuan Yew’s celebrated memoir, From Third World to First (2000). According
to this oft-cited narrative, Singapore has had to overcome near impossible odds to trans-
form itself from a sleepy Malay village into an urban cosmopolis that can hold its own
against established global cities like New York, London and Tokyo. Today, Singapore’s
enthusiasm for hyper-urbanism is apparent in the way its varied instruments of state
machinery – ministries, schools, media, and the like – are quick to adopt the ‘smart
city’ ideal to flourish in the twenty-first century.1

CONTACT Nazry Bahrawi nazry_bahrawi@sutd.edu.sg 8 Somapah Road, #04-101, Building 1, Level 4, Singapore
487372
*This paper is part of a special section Malay Cosmopolitan Intimacies in Malay Performing Arts and Literature: An
Introduction.
© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 JOURNAL OF INTERCULTURAL STUDIES 505

This paper proposes a counter-narrative to this widely accepted version of the Singa-
pore story. It argues for a noticeable strain of modern Malay prose produced from the
late twentieth century onward that perpetuates a longing for simpler times that values
the pursuit of rusticity over the smart city. The idea of ‘Malay modernity’ in Singapore
may sound like a misnomer. Malays make up just under a quarter of the city-state’s
Chinese-majority population. As a minority community, the Malays are subjected to
what Barr and Low describe as ‘systemic imbalances in the Singapore systems of meritoc-
racy and multiculturalism’ that position them as unfavourably in the spheres of ‘political
representation, education, housing, military service and language policy’ (Barr and Low
2005: 174).2 In other words, the Malays are seen as the least able to cope with demands
of modernity and progress. In proposing the counter-narrative, this paper presents itself
as an intervention into the wider philosophical debate about nostalgia set out by Svetlana
Boym in her seminal work, The Future of Nostalgia (2001). Boym had outlined two under-
standings of nostalgia. ‘Reflective nostalgia’ thrives on unveiling the contradiction of the
present while restorative nostalgia’ is geared towards reproducing the past. As discussed
in the next section, the theoretical concept of ‘rindu rustic’, or ‘rustic nostalgia’, could
offer a third understanding of nostalgia, which addresses the binary limitation of
Boym’s two concepts. Thus, the paper resists the decontextualised imposition of Boym’s
framework, which arose out of an intimate study of Slavic cultures, unto the Southeast
Asian nation of Singapore. Instead, it will draw from Nusantara expressions of nostalgia
stemming from the Malay word rindu, itself riddled with multifarious meanings of
longing, as a frame for understanding these counter-narratives. Finally, this article will
engage local scholarship by revisiting the sociologist Chua Beng Huat’s 1995 reading of
Singaporeans’ nostalgia for the kampong as initiated by resentment to the point of dwelling
in the comfort of the past in light of the idea of rindu rustic.
To this end, this paper will consider selected works by two notable Singapore Malay
authors, Suratman Markasan and Mohamed Latiff Mohamed3 in comparison to selected
works by two Malaysian authors as foil for comparison, Abdul Samad Ismail and Abdul
Samad Said, both of whom had spent their formative years in Singapore. It argues that
these works present differing interpretations of what can be collectively described as
rindu rustic that were shaped by their respective cultural and political contexts.
At its core, this paper is influenced by two overarching theoretical mandates. The first is
decoloniality defined by Walter Mignolo as the move to delineate alternatives to normative
knowledge systems that are Eurocentric in nature. In his book The Darker Side of Moder-
nity (2011), Mignolo equates decoloniality to an ‘epistemic and political project’ (2011:
xxv) to distinguish it from postcolonialism. He ventures that postcolonialism has not
quite fully rid itself of Eurocentrism because it reproduces a central paradigm of Euro-
centred modernity – the subject/object dichotomy. He writes in collaboration with Tlos-
tanova that
Postcolonial ‘studies’ and ‘theories’ as institutionalized through the U.S. academies and ex-
Western European empires fell back on the epistemic frame of Eurocentred modernity:
the distinction between the knowing subject and the known subject is implied in both the
notion of ‘study’ and in the notion of ‘theory’. Gandhi, Fanon, or Anzaldúa did not ‘study’
or ‘theorize’ British imperialism in India, black experience in the Caribbean, Berber experi-
ences in North African or Chicana experiences in the United States. Their political stance
went together with a decolonial shift in knowledge production – the shift we are
506 NAZRY B.

conceptualizing in terms of geo- and body-politic of knowledge. What kind of knowledge, for
what, and for whom? (Mignolo and Tlostanova 2008: 119–120)

A similar observation has been made by Syed Farid Alatas in his study of the fourteenth
century Arabic thinker, Ibn Khaldun. For Alatas, there is much to be gained from posi-
tioning Ibn Khaldun as a canonical global social thinker rather than an Islamic thinker.
Indeed, this disjuncture in the social sciences is expressed through the ways in which ‘the-
ories and models’ of nineteenth century European thinkers such as Karl Marx, Max Weber
and Émile Durkheim are applied to ‘areas outside of Europe’ while ‘the same attitude was
not applied to non-Western thinkers’, he argues (Alatas 2014: 1). Yet it must also be
qualified here that the paper does not intend to simply rehash the geopolitical East–
West ideological clash that forms the bedrock of Samuel P. Huntington’s book, The
Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of the World Order (1996). Rather, as mentioned,
its decolonial move is expressed in the way it steers clear of dogmatic forms of knowledge,
which both Mignolo and Alatas identify as having been manufactured by Eurocentric
thinkers, institutions and contexts. Recognising the need for alternatives to Eurocentred
modes of framing the world, this paper embraces the epistemological venture to apply
context-appropriate theories and models to its study of selected Malay literary texts
about Singapore. This means working out a theoretical framework borne from Malay
contexts.
To this end, its second theoretical construct is drawn from Wazir Jahan Karim’s
anthropological study of emotions in Malay culture. An early proponent of decoloniality,
Karim points to a crucial gap in social research on Malay culture by Western anthropol-
ogists – namely, the serious study of emotions in relation to social sentiment. For Karim,
the Malays possess ‘a distinct emotional register’ that is mired in the ‘thought processes of
its people’ but research on them has often been based on ‘passing observations of culture
or intuitive gut-level reasoning’ (Karim 1990: 13). This, she argues, has led to the wide-
spread (but mistaken) assumption that the Malays share social sentiments derived from
adat, a catch-all term to mean a wide range of things that include customary practices,
social institutions, systems of behaviour and process of socialisation, among others.
Karim argues that interlinking Malay emotions and sentiments in social research can
led to a better understanding of the cultural ebbs and flows of the community, thereby
filling the hitherto gap that she has described. She outlines her methodological rationale
such:
Sentiment, the system of values and social preferences of a group, recognized by all to be
important (sense of personal honor, integrity, notions of reciprocity, ‘national character’
in the crudest sense) is basically contained in an emotional mode. The psychological
responses and reactions of people and groups to one another may either reinforce or
disrupt social sentiments. They may be seen as constructs or intrusions upon day-to-day
life. (Karim 1990: 10)

This paper is particularly invested in Karim’s question of constructs and intrusions. It will
distil what Malay writers feel about the Singapore past, their longing for a sans-urban
utopia situated in a bygone era, their rindu for the rustic so to speak, in a bid to determine
if this reinforces or disrupts social sentiments of their community.4 But, this also reveals
the gaps in Karim’s methodology. While she recognises the diversity of the Malays, Karim
had not quite factored in how national identity may have affected a united sense of
 JOURNAL OF INTERCULTURAL STUDIES 507

community among the Malays. Her notion of national character in the above passage is
better understood as a cultural sense of community rather than political one. Seeing
that we are dealing with postcolonial Singapore, and two Malaysian authors’ sense of
their time there, this paper will unveil a stark disjuncture in their emotive imaginings
stemming from the differing socio-political contexts of the two nations. Yet another short-
coming relates to Karim’s constructed binary between emotions and intellect, implied
rather than stated outright, in her thesis. This binary is another central feature of Euro-
centred modernity, expressed in its initial stages arguably through the Socratic divide
between soul and body and which later morphed into the Cartesian duality between
mind and body – in which the mind, as a signifier for reason, should be valued over
the body. To qualify, this paper does not wish to channel that Eurocentred hierarchy of
meaning within the human self. Rather, it is concerned with the study of emotions – in
this case, rindu – as a category that possesses merits on its own terms, and thereby deser-
ving of critical attention.
Thus, we begin with some basic questions. What is rindu? And does it translate easily to
nostalgia? An indication of its meaning can be gleaned from Karl G. Herder’s study of
emotional register in three Indonesian dialects (Minangkabau, Minangkabau Indonesian
and Javanese Indonesian). Before going further, a qualification needs to be made here.
While there are lexical differences between standard Malay varieties of Malaysia and Indo-
nesia, there is also ‘a high degree of mutual intelligibility between all these standard var-
ieties, which are said to derive from the Malay of Johor in Peninsular Malay’, according to
Clynes and Deterding (2011: 259). This seems to be the case with the Malay word rindu, in
which the Indonesian version appears to be synonymous to the Malaysian one. A quick
online search of word at the Kamus DBP website, the official Malaysian government’s
online dictionary, generates the following two definitions:
1 (berasa) sangat ingin hendak pulang atau hendak bertemu dgn seseorang […]. 2 = ∼
dendam perasaan sangat cinta atau kasih kpd (seseorang) […]

1 (feeling) an intense desire to go home or to meet with someone […]. 2 = ∼ harbouring sen-
timents of intense love or affection for (a person) […] (Translation mine)
Kamus DBP

In the above, we get the sense of the double meaning of the word – encouraging action in
the first instance, and yet also outlining the helplessness of longing with the second. In
both instances, the person seems to be the focus of attention. A similar meaning can be
gleaned from Herder’s study of emotional registers within Indonesian literature. There,
rindu translates to ‘longing’, especially to ‘parents and the home village’ (Herder 1991:
72), especially those produced by the Minangkabau people whose members are famous
for ‘their pattern of temporary out-migration called merantau’ (1991: 73). Analysing a
short folk poem in the form of a pantun, Herder points to an interesting feature of how
rindu (in this case, for a person) has been expressed in text – longing was articulated
indirectly ‘by not talking about any person as the subject of nostalgia, but instead using
the cliché image of the overgrown yard of the deserted or neglected house’ (1991: 73).
As this article will show, the poetical rhetoric of expressing longing by way of a symbol
is just as prevalent in prose. Meanwhile, our brief attempt at uncovering the meaning
of the word rindu has shown that the word reflects at least two renditions that deal
508 NAZRY B.

with human agency (doing something, but also feeling impotent) in the Malay version,
while the Indonesian version appears to emphasise place more than person, likely the
product of the Minangkabau’s practice of merantau. The next section will explore
which of these meanings govern the modern Malay prose about Singapore’s kampong past.

Kampong Nostalgia in Prose

From the late 1990s till the present, there is a noticeable emphasis in modern Malay lit-
erary works produced by Singaporean writers on the theme of kampong nostalgia.5 For
the uninitiated, the kampong (sometimes spelt as kampung) refers to the traditional
village peculiar to the Malay world. Most kampongs are known as enclosed settlements pri-
marily inhabited by the Malays, though there are also some whose denizens are domi-
nantly Chinese or Indians. In Singapore, the publication period of these writings is
significant for the fact that most kampongs were demolished by then, save for a select
few, the most significant being Kampong Lorong Buangkok in the northeastern part of
mainland Singapore.6 In fact, kampong narratives that did not qualify as nostalgic were
prevalent in Malay popular culture before this period. In an essay, the playwright and
poet Alfian bin Sa’at has demonstrated that kampong narratives in the form of Malay
films of the 1960s produced in Singapore channeled the city–hinterland dichotomy that
presented the city as the repository of ‘materialism, decadence and impiety’ or
‘“Western” evils’ and the kampong as ‘a site where traditions could be preserved and main-
tained, geographically located at a remote distance from the city and thus isolated from its
influence’ (Alfian 2012: 37). Indeed, aspects of this dichotomy can also be seen in my
analysis of selected works.
Even though there were several literary works exploring the theme of kampong nostal-
gia during the period that I am interested in, I have chosen to focus on those written by
two winners of the Cultural Medallion award, which is conferred to iconic Singapore cul-
tural figures to acknowledge their long-standing contribution to the local arts scene. These
are the novel Penghulu Yang Hilang Segala-Galanya (1998) by the 2010 winner Suratman
Markasan, and three short stories (or cerita pendek in Malay) from Nostalgia Yang Hilang
(2004), a short story collection by the 2016 winner Mohamed Latiff Mohamed. My choices
rest on two factors. The first has to do with their critical reception. Both books had gained
traction among critics, with Mohamed Latiff’s collection being conferred the 2006 Singa-
pore Literature Prize.7 Both works were later translated into English, thus attesting to their
worth and influence within literary circles. Suratman’s novel was published as Penghulu in
2012, while Mohamed Latiff’s short stories were rendered into English as part of a collec-
tion called Lost Nostalgia in 2017.8 For the purpose of this essay, I will refer to the English
versions of these prose for easy access to those who do not comprehend Malay, while
acknowledging the fact that these renditions may not accurately capture the pristine
meanings of these original writings. To provide a brief synopsis, Penghulu narrates the
pains and tribulations of Pak Suleh, a former chief of a kampong at a fictional offshore Sin-
gapore island, who was an unwilling participant of the Government resettlement plan to
move village dwellers to public housing flats on mainland Singapore. With Lost Nostalgia,
I have chosen to look at three stories. These are ‘Second Class’ (‘Guru’ in the original)
about a soon-to-retire Malay teacher who is frustrated with the current state of Singapore’s
education system; ‘Ibu’ (same title as the original) which outlines the struggles of an elderly
 JOURNAL OF INTERCULTURAL STUDIES 509

but spirited Malay woman who had fallen ill because she was forced to move out of her
kampong to public housing; and lastly the titular story ‘Lost Nostalgia’ (‘Nostalgia Yang
Hilang’ in the original), which narrates the brief trip home of a middle-aged Singaporean
Malay man who has settled in England for decades.
The second factor has to do with the authors’ similar backgrounds, which makes it
easier to speculate their motivations and goals. Both writers were members of the
Malay literary association Angkatan Sasterawan ‘50, or ASAS ‘50 as it is popularly
known. On its website, the association lists one of its aims as ‘to free the (Malay) commu-
nity from psychological and intellectual oppression left behind during the reign of the
colonial masters and the Japanese Occupation’ (Asas ‘50: par.3). Indeed, both authors
had articulated similar grievances relating to their profession as Malay language educators
in pre-tertiary schools at around the same time period. Here, they had presumably experi-
enced on a first-hand basis the degradation of the language’s prestige within the Singapore
education system. In Suratman’s Penghulu, we see this play out in a conversation between
the protagonist Pak Suleh and his teenage son, Juasa:
‘Did you watch TV last night, Bak? Our new President spoke in Malay. He really sounded like
a Malay!’ Juasa said as he rubbed his father’s chest with oil.

‘That’s it, see how even non-Malays can really speak like Malays. And you Malays can’t even
pass your language exams. Serves you all right’. (Suratman 2012: 4)

Here, the Malay language becomes a signifier for cultural authenticity, suggesting that
its degradation equates to the sense of alienation of urban Malays from their heritage. This
same issue was given some airing in Mohamed Latiff’s short story ‘Second Class’. Here, a
cynical aged Malay language teacher named Cikgu Ariff hankers after a time when educa-
tors like him were not just tasked to instruct on the Malay language but so too arithmetic,
geography, history and the defunct subject of the Jawi script. Those were the days, Cikgu
Ariff believes, when Malay teachers had ‘dignity’ and were ‘cultivating the nation’s youths’
(Mohamed Latiff 2017: 89). As with Herder’s interpretation of the pantun above, we see
here the invocation of longing for a pristine past by way of a cliché symbol (the degra-
dation of the Malay language) as the subject of nostalgia. Ironically, the only character
to speak in ‘near perfect Malay’ (Mohamed Latiff 2017: 23) in Mohamed Latiff’s story
‘Lost Nostalgia’ is the unnamed brother as he embarks on a tour of his childhood
places during his homecoming trip to Singapore following a hiatus of about three
decades in England. This stands in contrast to the story’s two other characters, his
sister and mother, who had spent their entire lives in Singapore. These latter characters
were less pristine with their use of Malay. Within the internal logics of the story, the broth-
er’s better mastery of Malay serves to reinforce what his character symbolises – the very
embodiment of nostalgia as a diasporic Malay person, mirroring the sense of longing
that often afflicts the Minangkabau people who practices merantau. To this end, the
brother does much more (than his sister) to keep in touch with his heritage. In
England, he reads great works of Malay literature and discusses these with Malaysian stu-
dents there. At Singapore, he stubbornly insists on visiting iconic Malay sites of his child-
hood in Singapore, like Kampong Wak Tanjung and Sekolah Padang Terbakar, even if
they were no longer there. Lamentations of things that were lost can also be seen in Surat-
man’s Penghulu in the form of Pak Suleh’s complaints about the most banal things, such as
510 NAZRY B.

the lack of good air and ‘fresh fish to eat’ (Suratman 2012: 11) on mainland Singapore as
opposed to his time at Pulau Sebidang, the offshore island where his kampong was located.
There is, however, a crucial difference between the meaning of rindu in these Singapore
proses of Malay nostalgia and that invoked by Kamus DBP or Herder’s study of Indone-
sian dialects. The disjuncture between the two meanings is emotive in character. Where
the Indonesian and Malaysian versions of rindu appear to emphasise the conflation of
love and loss, the sense of longing found in these Singapore prose is mired in resentment
and indignation. The rebellion is directed at the establishment’s (in this case, the govern-
ment) unflinching pursuit of progress, in which the kampongs are figured as impediments.
It follows then that there is no choice but to resettle the villagers, a move which had unra-
velled a tight-knit community. In Penghulu, Pak Suleh voiced this when he spoke of the
difficulty of mobilising his followers to action (to search for his missing daughter,
Sohrah) in his new urban setting of Singapore’s public housing as opposed to his previous
life in the kampong, remarking to his wife:
… at that time I was penghulu and I had people who were loyal to me. But now what has
happened to all my people? They are all now living in these tiny birdhouses, just like us.
Here a few, there a few, some, I don’t even know where they are living. How are they
going to find food for their families? If it was as before, I could order Lazim, Pari and
Pagi to gather the inhabitants in the small mosque or hall and within fifteen minutes they
would have been gather three or four hundred men and surely we would have been able
to find Sohrah, but now what do we have, Mun? (Suratman 2012: 21)

The above literally captures the divisive impact that resettlement has had on the Malay
community. As the passage suggests, this top-down venture on the part of the government
is reminiscent of an even older scheme of control – that is, the colonial strategy to divide
and rule – making it appear like a continuation of a past hegemony. This sheds light on the
possible cause for these feelings of resentment entangled within the Malay nostalgia of
these Singapore proses.
While the angst is justifiable from the perspective of neo-colonial hegemony, it must
also be said that the Malay nostalgia in these Singapore proses is patriarchal, privileging
male power expressed through the appeal to feudal symbols over gender equality. Pak
Suleh in Penghulu describes himself as a ‘king who ruled a country’ (Suratman 2012:
13) in his days as village chief, and remembers his days then as having had ‘loyal’ followers,
as in the above passage, who were often ‘just awaiting on (his) orders’ (Suratman 2012: 18).
The story positions Pak Suleh’s wife, Mak Timun, in the antithetical stance of welcoming
progress. She urges him to see a doctor to treat his asthma. To Pak Suleh’s statement that
nothing will change if God does not will it, her rational reply is: ‘Death is in God’s hands,
but we’ve also been asked to do our best’ (Suratman 2012: 14). Still, we find Mak Timun
and her daughter Sohrah eventually follow Pak Suleh back to the island by the end of the
story, an emotive decision on his part. At first glance, Penghulu seems to suggest a fasci-
nating reversal of gender stereotype that was once common to Western cultures – men are
figured as emotional, while women are rational. A deeper analysis would demystify that
interpretation, though. The other male characters in the story, such as Suleh’s sons-in-
law Maideen and Syed Farid, are also depicted as true blue urbanites. Both characters
thrive in the city, each pursuing important posts within governmental institutions. It is
not simply any Malay man who is emotional; just the ones who are passionate about
 JOURNAL OF INTERCULTURAL STUDIES 511

the kampong. The story’s ending outlines the mysterious disappearance of Pak Suleh, Mak
Timun and Sohrah from the island just as Maideen, by now a parliamentarian, arrives with
the police to arrest them for trespassing. With this ending, magic triumphs over science,
positioning the rural as a force of nature, something that cannot be reckoned with. A
different ending punctuates Mohamed Latiff’s ‘Ibu’, yet another story about forced
urban resettlement in Singapore. Here, the eponymic protagonist is an aged Malay
woman who had subjected herself to physical pain, to the point of not eating or speaking,
because she was exhorted to move out of her kampong. Within the space of some eight
pages, readers are taken through her tribulations and reason for doing so. However, at
end of the story, in a matter of three paragraphs, we note a surprising change in Ibu’s
behaviour. Now described as residing in her new Housing Development Board (HDB)
apartment, Ibu has fully recovered, and has begun to eat and speak again. Ibu reacts non-
chalantly as her son tells her that their kampong is soon to be demolished. She instructs
him to sell the wood in their former house because ‘flats will appear’ in its vicinity
(Mohamed Latiff 2017: 71). One possible interpretation to this turn is a tacit acknowledge-
ment on the part of Ibu that life is indeed better in the modern flats. Yet, Mohamed Latiff is
known for his irony, rendering such a reading flawed. A more plausible interpretation
relates to the gendered dimension of kampong nostalgia, raised earlier. The ease with
which Ibu changes her stance suggests that she did not fully believe in her protest in
the first place. Despite her seemingly visceral reactions, Ibu’s source of dissent can be
traced to her father’s wish, which she makes clear to her son, Ali:
Do you know what Grandpa said before he died? Do you know his wishes? Look after this
kampung. Don’t be materialistic. Make sure it lasts for eternity. Let it pass from one gener-
ation to the next. Others know of us because of this kampung. They know we belong here.
These words he constantly stressed, even on his deathbed. Even at the edge of life, he was
insistent on this. (Mohamed Latiff 2017: 65)

Here, Ibu plays the role of the perfect messenger for her father, a loyal follower that the like
of Pak Suleh of Penghulu would have been elated to have. Her father’s dream becomes her
own, but it dissipates just as quickly when demolition of the kampong becomes imminent.
She appears easily swayed. In comparison, Pak Suleh refuses to give up, making possible
the impossible. This nuanced yet crucial difference leads us to the same conclusion – both
stories express the longing for Malay rusticity in the form of the kampong as the loss of
male power. Malay nostalgia then becomes a contestation of patriarchal power, a battle
between rustic kampong men and neo-colonial city men. It should come as no surprise
that the antagonists in Ibu and Penghulu are both male members of parliament. But,
there is more to unveil behind these Malay proses of kampong nostalgia beyond the
lenses of neo-colonialism and gender. In order to get at it, it is productive to read the
above alongside other texts about Singapore kampongs by writers outside our specified
time period, and national borders.

Longing and Belonging between the Causeway

In the heydays of Malaya when borders were porous and pan-Malay nationalism was high,
two Malay creative writers and intellectual figures north of the Causeway by the name of
Abdul Samad Ismail and Abdul Samad Said had spent their formative years in Singapore
before settling in Malaysia following the separation, moves that were premised on an
512 NAZRY B.

ideological rupture, between the two states. Aside from the fact that they were affectio-
nately known as Pak Samad, both had produced literary narratives set in Singapore,
which had also appealed to sentiments of rindu rustic. Yet the anachronism of their
works to the period described above, as well as the fact that they were resident in Malaysia
while writing these, make their works suitable foils for comparison to Suratman and
Mohamed Latiff’s proses. Let us first consider the short story entitled ‘Ubi Kayu’
(1944), later translated as ‘Tapioca’ (2018 [1968]), penned by Abdul Samad Ismail, who
is an author, journalist and founding member of Singapore’s reigning political party,
the People’s Action Party. While he was instrumental in drafting the PAP’s first manifesto
and garnering Malay support for the party’s early foundational years, Samad Ismail’s left-
leaning politics had put him at odds with Lee Kuan Yew, leading him to leave the party in
1957, and to depart Singapore for good later in 1959. His story ‘Tapioca’ is a fictional
account of a young urban man who spent his day visiting a farm at Geylang Serai in
search of good tapioca. Along with two other female friends from the city, the man
found himself bowled over by the hospitality shown by the farmer Wak Ali and his
family. Unlike the works by Suratman and Mohamed Latiff, this story does not directly
peddle sentiments of loss and absence, nor is it tinged with sentiment of resentment.
Rather, the story paints an idyllic picture of the rustic life. Samad Ismail’s early political
affinities for Marxist texts and thoughts9 could lead some to read this as a Malayan
version of Marxist propaganda literature that aims to present the peasantry (Wak Ali)
as the refined and ethical antithesis to self-serving urban capitalists (the narrator). Here,
the transactional, profit-seeking nature of the urban characters is especially stark at the
moment the narrator and his female companions realise that they have got what they
came for: ‘Seeing our baskets filled up, which meant that the supply of tapioca would
not run out for a day or two, we knew that the time has come for us to leave’ (Samad I.
2018: 88). Yet, the story can also be interpreted as a subtle call to action for its readers
to preserve rural Malay hinterland spaces, most of which were facing redevelopment
when Singapore became an independent nation-state in 1965. Indications of the Malay
specificity of the utopian farm in the story can be gleaned from the name of the space
itself ‘Kebun Melayu’ which translates as ‘Malay garden’. It is also notable that the
ambin or raised platform for sitting or resting – a uniquely Malay architecture within a
kampong house – becomes the site for happy conversations between the host and his
guests from the city. With this latter interpretation, the story’s urban guests can be
viewed not so much as ill-meaning capitalists as they are fodders to move the story’s
readers (likely, urbanites) towards a certain resolution – that is, the realisation that
rustic spaces matter, and may be better. Indeed, the narrator and his peers were awed
by the hospitality and sense of nobility of their host Wak Ali, suggesting empathy for
the space the latter inhabits and what it represents.
Resentment is also notably absent in the Singapore-set prose of Abdul Samad Said, the
Malaysian national laureate who grew up in Singapore till he was about 24. His time in
Singapore coincided with the Japanese occupation, as he captures some of the trauma
of that period in his magnum opus about a kindly prostitute, Salina (1961). Like Samad
Ismail, Samad Said left Singapore for good in 1959 though their circumstances differ.
Samad Said’s move to Kuala Lumpur was not as strongly premised on a fierce ideological
fallout, though he too professed leftist political leanings as evidenced from his time
working for the Fikiran Rakyat newspaper with Ahmad Boestamam, the anti-colonial
 JOURNAL OF INTERCULTURAL STUDIES 513

freedom fighter who had later established the socialist political party, Parti Rakyat Malay-
sia. It is more accurate to say that Samad Said left to pursue greener pastures, having
landed a job at the Malay newspaper, Utusan Melayu. This is the same paper that had
employed Samad Ismail, who left it to join its competitor Berita Harian when he
moved to Kuala Lumpur in 1959. As this timeline indicates, Salina was published in
the immediate years following Samad Said’s departure from Singapore. He had since pub-
lished other works that were set in Singapore but stopped doing so in 1980. Then, after a
break of 16 years, Samad Said featured Singapore as the backdrop one more time in Lantai
T. Pinkie (1996), translated as T. Pinkie’s Floor (2010), a play about a group of dance hos-
tesses at a nightclub.
In both these works, Samad Said writes about the outliers of society, training his atten-
tion to what could be described as urban perantau or travellers, characters living in a city
that may not brazenly acknowledge them as contributing denizens. They are hostesses,
prostitutes, gangsters and former sailors. They struggle to make a living but are not
limited by their poverty. In fact, they display about them a sense of worldliness that is
anchored to their immediate vicinity. These Singapore characters of Pak Samad Said’s
works may be urbanites but they exude a sense of the rustic expressed as the idea that
the city’s common folks are ‘the salt of the earth’ type in the manner ascribed to Wak
Ali in Samad Ismail’s short story. They are, in short, cosmopolitans.
Take, for instance, Siti Salina who is the protagonist of Salina. Before the Japanese
Occupation, she was the daughter of a diamond trader but her good fortune ended
when her entire family got killed by a Japanese bomb. To make ends meet, Salina
turned to prostitution. Without anyone looking out for her, she suffered abuse at the
hands of her lover Abdul Fakar. Despite her lowly station in society, Salina partly paid
the school fees for Helmy, a poor boy in her district – mirroring Samad Said’s own experi-
ence in Singapore where prostitutes he befriended as a kid had also funded his education.
Even the villainous Abdul Fakar is redeeming in his worldliness. Fakar’s two favourite hos-
tesses were named after Bollywood stars, Suraiya and Madhubala.
These characters seem to embody what Stuart Hall (2008) calls ‘cosmopolitanism from
below’ or ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’, a feature that Hall observed of the working class
and migrant communities of London whose members had no choice but to live with differ-
ence on a daily basis in order to survive. This stands in opposition to the elite cosmopo-
litan imaginary that Leurs and Gergiou describes as premised on ‘deterritorialized,
postracial, individual choice and singular personhood’ (2016: 3703). Samad Said’s charac-
ters settle comfortably within Hall’s definition, rendering them with the quality of folkish
authenticity. This folkishness of Samad Said’s works also paint a slightly different picture
of Malayness from that invoked by the Malay Singaporean writers, Suratman and
Mohamed Latiff, but also Samad Ismail. That difference has to do with the manner
Samad Said expresses nostalgia. At this juncture, it is important to revisit the two concepts
of utopia conceptualised by Svetlana Boym in her book The Future of Nostalgia (2001).
The first is restorative nostalgia, which ‘does not think itself as nostalgia, but rather as
truth and tradition’ (Boym 2001: 32). The second type is reflective nostalgia, which
‘dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away
from the contradictions of modernity’ (Boym 2001: 32). The case of Salina suggests
that Samad Said’s nostalgia fits better with the latter. The same can be said of his play
T. Pinkie’s Floor, where readers are introduced to the protagonist Nyai Sunarti, a dance
514 NAZRY B.

club hostess who had entered into a transactional relationship with a Dutchman, Von
Klinkert Delarosa. When Delarosa left for Holland, Sunarti waited patiently for her
lover to return, often reminiscing to her friends at the dance club about their time together,
not shy of revealing even the raunchy details. Sunarti harboured hope that Delarosa would
return, but he predictably did not.
This work too can be said to have been drawn from the author’s real life experience,
considering that Samad Said himself lived near the New World Amusement Park
during his time in Singapore. The New World Amusement Park is one of three amuse-
ment parks that featured an array of exciting shows such as cabaret, striptease and
boxing matches for the night crowds of Singapore – Europeans and locals alike. Sunarti’s
transactional relationship mistaken for love represents the quashing of the longing for a
pristine past. Sunarti’s realisation that her nostalgia for Delarosa was illusory seems to
channel Samad Said’s own longing for the Singapore he once knew, and therefore rep-
resents a catharsis of sorts for him. After all, the full title of this play includes the
words ‘a nostalgic play’, interpretable as referring to the author’s own nostalgia. Samad
Said’s nostalgia conforms to what Boym describes as reflective. While it mirrors the
longing displayed by the characters in the works of the three other writers examined
above, Samad Said’s nostalgia does not romanticise nor perpetuate the idea that absolute
truth is to mined in the rustic past, a sentiment that is clearly present in the works of the
other three. The difference has to do with the kinds of political rhetoric concerning Malay-
ness that emerged out of the 1965 separation between Singapore and Malaysia, as our con-
cluding section explores.

Rindu Rustic as Retrospect

How was Malayness expressed following the rupture of Malaya as a postcolonial federa-
tion of states? The answer to this question could shed light on the literary longings for Sin-
gapore’s rustic past that this article has discussed so far. To begin is to note that the
constitutions of Singapore and Malaysia recognise the special position of the Malays as
indigenous people. In light of the Separation, this can be read as a response to assuage
the anxieties of the Malays, who saw their overall numbers reduced in Malaysia, but
more drastically in Singapore because they were rendered a minority overnight. Yet, the
practise of multiculturalism had differed in nuanced ways as the two nations mature. In
Malaysia, multiculturalism has been expressed polemically at the hands of the political
parties United Malay National Organisation (UMNO) and Parti Islam Se-Malaysia
(PAS), which had imbued Malayness with a supremacist and a conservative religious
bent respectively.10 While these two bents are largely absent in Singapore, Malay identity
is just as susceptible to fixity. As a case in point, candidates for its 2017 presidential elec-
tion reserved for the Malays have had to respond to public scrutiny over their authenticity
as Malays.11 This obsession to determine who qualifies as an authentic Malay can help us
better understand the theme of kampong nostalgia in the works of Suratman and
Mohamed Latiff. For them, rusticity is a primary marker of Malay identity, possibly as
important as mastery of the Malay language. These Singapore authors’ longing for a
rustic past, their rindu rustic, therefore symbolises a nostalgia for a golden age, situated
in their collective cultural memory as a utopian kampong where life was much better
for the Malays. Little wonder that their distinctive resentment becomes an expression of
 JOURNAL OF INTERCULTURAL STUDIES 515

anger for the injustice that they perceived were done unto them as self-identified members
of an ethnic minority group.
Yet Malay rusticity has also been subjected to a form of cultural appropriation in Sin-
gapore. The camaraderie of kampong dwellers captured by the four authors has been co-
opted into state narratives and repackaged as ‘the kampong spirit’. A quick internet search
would show this term appearing in countless ministerial speeches and mainstream media
reports. It is defined rather accurately by Wiktionary as ‘a sense of social cohesion in a
community where there is understanding and compromise among neighbours, even as
preferences differ from household to household’ (‘Kampong Spirit’ 2018). It is in fact a
manifestation of Singapore’s ideology of multiculturalism that perpetuates social
harmony between ethnic races, a reductive idea of multiculturalism that stops short of
recognising Singapore’s superdiversity stemming from differences in wealth, sexualities
and political affiliations, among others (Nazry 2014). Works that fit into this national
agenda are celebrated. One example is Josephine Chia’s Kampong Spirit: Life in Potong
Pasir, 1955 to 1965 (2013), which clinched the 2014 Singapore Literature Prize in the
non-fiction category. The idea of the kampong spirit continues into Singapore’s techno-
logical phase of development. As the nation moves into overdrive with its smart nation
drive, the idea has resulted in a research project to create ‘new urban kampongs’, worth
S$6 million, that ‘combines data analytics and behavioural studies to predict how demo-
graphics in HDB (Housing Development Board) towns are likely to evolve, and forecast
residents’ responses to initiatives in their living environment’ reports The Straits Times
(Au-yong 2017: para. 5). In essence, these narratives are meant to reproduce the practice
of ‘gotong-royong’, or ‘mutual help’ displayed by the kampong folks of yesteryears, a com-
munal feature that is expressed as the ease of mobilisation of neighbours towards a
common goal, usually traumatic, in Suratman’s Penghulu and Mohamed Latiff’s Ibu.
Yet, this is also an oversimplification of kampong life, which also features betrayal,
greed and conflict between its dwellers as outlined in some of the examined proses.
To a certain extent, this harking back to a pristine Malay rustic past was also subtly
invoked in Samad Ismail’s story Tapioca. As a founding member of the victorious PAP
party, Samad Ismail may be expressing his residual affinity for Singapore here, having pub-
lished the story in 1944 while he was still living there. Unlike Suratman and Mohamed
Latiff’s works, resentment was markedly absent in Samad Ismail’s story, which could be
tied to the fact that rustic Malay spaces still existed at the time at both sides of the Cause-
way. At the time Tapioca was published, Samad Ismail was not yet privy to the full impact
of rural-urban resettlement experienced by Suratman and Mohamed Latiff. There was,
therefore, little cause for cynicism. Compare this to Samad Said’s T. Pinkie’s Floor pub-
lished in 1996, a prose that was published much closer to the spike in kampong nostalgia
proses. The work serves as an interesting foil to the latter Singapore works in that it fea-
tures longing, but does not reproduce sentiments of resentment. Why is this so? The case
can be made that Samad Said’s rindu rustic in T. Pinkie’s Floor is not tied to national iden-
tity. In Suratman and Mohamed Latiff’s proses, kampong nostalgia is very much informed
by a form of cosmopolitanism meant to urge their readers to acknowledge Malay indigene-
ity, one that is drawn from the fact that the Malays remain an ethnic minority in Singa-
pore. Their sense of a cosmopolitan Singapore past entrenches the nation-state, being very
much an attempt at gaining recognition of the role played by Malays in contributing to the
growth of the nation. Unlike Suratman and Mohamed Latiff, Samad Said does not seem
516 NAZRY B.

perturbed by the significant loss of Malay places in Singapore. Why should he? After all,
Samad Said was also celebrated north of the Causeway, a nation possessing abundant
rustic spaces, and where Malay language is still the primary medium of communication
and education. In his Singapore-set works, Samad Said therefore did not need to
lament the disappearance of rusticity or Malayness with the same urgency that Suratman
and Mohamed Latiff probably felt compelled to do. Samad Said’s Singapore works are not
about the Singapore nation. They are not even about the Malaysian nation. As argued, they
fit better into Hall’s idea of vernacular cosmopolitanism in which Singapore becomes the
lens through which Pak Samad can challenge fixed notions of inclusivity, especially
because his characters exist on society’s margins.
By way of literary analysis, this article has outlined a distinctive challenge to the tyranny
of a single story. That story is Singapore’s teleological progress from a third world nation
to a first world nation, which is built on the assumption that this island was once a sleepy
Malay village and that rusticity represents regression and stasis. Yet, the challenge to this
posed by Malay Singaporean authors is that the nation’s thirdworldliness expressed in the
form of its rustic kampong past, and taken to be an integral feature of Malayness, is not at
all antithetical to progress and modernisation. In their proses of angst, the authors signals
an emotive longing full of fierce defiance. How does this square up against Boym’s two
conceptions of nostalgias? It suggests that one can conceptualise a third form, which
has some features of her restorative nostalgia in its belief of a pristine past. Yet, despite
the anger, rindu rustic of the Singapore Malay authors does not to seek to return to
that moment in the past. Rather, its lamentations are directed at unveiling the contradic-
tions of modernity in the same way Boym’s reflective nostalgia is meant to do. In so doing,
this article is a decolonial attempt at resisting yet another form of imposition of a single
story – the use of Western-centric frames unto contexts that are dissimilar, thus resisting
the universality of ‘theory’.
As an attempt to engage local scholarship, the concept of rindu rustic can also be taken
as a critique of Chua Beng Huat’s oft-cited theory of Singapore nostalgia for the imagined
kampong. For Chua, the Singaporean longing for the kampong past was akin to a form of
escapism from the degraded present that are ‘destabilising’ and ‘stressful’ (Chua 1995: 7).
Singaporeans nurse the desire to return to a reassuring past with the kampong becoming a
symbolic placeholder for that sense of comfort. Chua positions this nostalgia as a critique
of the established order. To date, the shortfall of Chua’s theory has already been high-
lighted by at least two academics. Elmo Gonzaga reads Singapore’s embrace of the
‘smart city’ doctrine to postulate that Chua’s citizenry critique has become moot
because nostalgia has been co-opted by the state in the age of information economy to
curate ‘new modes of citizenship centred on creativity, flexibility and entrepreneurship’
(Gonzaga 2019: 153). I have earlier alluded to this co-optation when highlighting the
multi-million ‘new urban kampong’ project. Then, there is also the observation made by
Joanne Leow that works by young Singaporean artists like Tan Pin Pin’s film Invisible
City (2007) and Alfian Sa’at’s collection of poems, A History of Amnesia (2001) did not
seem to take nostalgia as ‘comfortable’ or ‘reassuring’, but in fact ‘destabilising’ (Leow
2010: 119). Leow had compared these works to those produced by Singaporean artists
who was born before the 1965 independence such as Lee Tzu Peng and Arthur Yap
whose nostalgia seems to conform to Chua’s description. The notion of rindu rustic
builds on Gonzaga and Leow’s scholarship. While this article has shown that resentment
 JOURNAL OF INTERCULTURAL STUDIES 517

fuels the nostalgic writings of Suratman and Mohamed Latiff, something that Chua has
observed of kampong nostalgia, it does not reduce their works to mere escapism in the
way Chua reads popular nostalgia. Rather, their writings conform to the works of
younger Singaporean artists, Tan and Alfian, in that the past is not the ideal country. Com-
pared to their Chinese peers (Yap and Lee), Suratman and Mohamed Latiff can be con-
sidered ahead of their time, prefiguring the destabilising feature of nostalgic narratives
that were later displayed by Tan and Alfian. Against the stereotype of Malay regression,
Suratman and Mohamed Latiff are better seen as visionary critics of unbridled progress,
and possibly makers of Malay modernity.

Notes
1. Singapore’s ‘smart nation’ initiative was launched in December 2014 by prime minister Lee
Hsien Loong (2014).
2. Barr and Low point to a series of articles that had captured the challenges faced by Malay
Singaporeans. These are by Sukmawati (1995), Li (1989), Lily (1998), Moore (2000) and
Chih (2002a, 2002b, 2003). I would further add Khoo and Lim (2004) on trainee teachers’
perception of the Malays as well as Imran (2007) on heritage.
3. The dilemma of properly citing Malay names in academic journals is further proof of the
dominance of Eurocentred knowledge production. The convention has been to cite the
last name of a scholar or author. European last names (Smith or Spinoza) channel the
family name, which also works for Chinese names (Chua) or Arabic names (Alatas).
However, the Malays do not carry the family name in their last names. Instead, their last
names often refer to their fathers such as the case of my last name, Bahrawi, which is
short for ‘bin Bahrawi’ or ‘son of Bahrawi’. Female Malay names have ‘binte’ or ‘daughter
of’ in place of ‘bin’. While I have published some five academic articles that relented to
the Eurocentred norms of citing Malay last names at this stage of my career, this article
will mark the first time that I am making a decolonial stand to properly cite Malay names
in the ‘References’ section. This is done in two ways. Where the names do not contain
‘bin’ or ‘binte’, I will cite authors by their first name. This will result in examples such as
‘Nazry Bahrawi’ being reproduced as ‘Nazry B.’ and ‘Lily Zubaidah Rahim’ being reproduced
as ‘Lily Z.R.’. However, in cases where authors do include ‘bin’ or ‘binte’ in their works, I will
reproduce the names as they are such as in the cases of ‘Imran bin Tajudeen’ or ‘Alfian bin
Sa’at’. For in-text citations, I will reproduce to the best of my ability the author’s first names,
except in cases where a confusion might arise in the examples of ‘Samad Ismail’ and ‘Samad
Said’ because both authors would be reproduced as ‘Abdul Samad’ if I were to blindly follow
this rule.
4. It is worth mentioning here that Susan Stewart in her book On Longing (1993: 135) had
argued that nostalgia is experienced emotionally as loss and jouissance at the same time,
drawing from the ideas of Sigmund Freud. However, in the decolonial spirit of this article,
I will instead theorise the emotionality of nostalgia by engaging with Malay texts and
scholarship.
5. Some other works include English-Malay Nadiputra’s bilingual play Muzika Lorong Buang
Kok (2012) and Isa Kamari’s Rawa: Tragedi Pulau Batu Puteh (2009). In poetry, lamentation
of lost Malay places, including the kampong, is also a recurrent theme in the English-Malay
bilingual collection Sikit Sikit Lama Lama Jadi Bukit (2017) translated by Annaliza Bakri.
6. Kampong Lorong Buangkok is the last surviving village in mainland Singapore. For a short
history of Singapore kampongs, please read ‘From Villages to Flats (Part 1)’ (2016 [2012]) in
the blog, Remember Singapore.
7. Suratman’s Penghulu has been widely written about by literary critics. See, for instance,
Azhar Ibrahim Alwee’s ‘Malay Literature in Singapore: Lines of Thoughts and Conflicting
Ideas’ (2014).
518 NAZRY B.

8. These stories were professionally translated by me with the title Lost Nostalgia (2017).
9. A. Samad Ismail defies any easy political categorization, having shown sympathies for other
ideological movements. See the article ‘The Enigma of A. Samad Ismail’ (Tan 2009) in s/
pores.
10. See, for instance, Clive Kessler’s op-ed commentary, ‘Old enemies reconcile as Malaysians
election near’ (East Asia Forum, 2017).
11. See, for instance, The Straits Times’s article, ‘Presidential Election 2017: Question of who is
Malay continues to be raised’ (Nur Asyiqin 2017).

Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Migrating Concepts: Cosmopolitanism, Multi-
culturalism and Conviviality across the Asia Pacific conference at the Nanyang Technological Uni-
versity Singapore in February 2018. The author would like to express gratitude to his fellow
panellists, Alicia Izharuddin and Adil Johan, and the attendees of the panel who offered valuable
insights for the development of this study. The author is also grateful to the reviewers for
reading and commenting on this article, of which revisions were completed during my residency
at the Toji Cultural Center in South Korea.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor
Nazry Bahrawi is Senior Lecturer at Singapore University of Technology and Design. He specialises
in the study of world literature, literary and critical theory as well as Islam and culture between
Southeast Asia and the Middle East. He has published in the journals CounterText (Edinburgh
UP), Journal of World Literature (Brill), Literature and Theology (Oxford UP), and Green
Letters: Studies in Ecocriticsm (Taylor and Francis). He has also contributed to the edited
volumes Translation and Global Asia (Chinese University Press, 2014), Reading the Abrahamic
Faiths (Bloomsbury, 2014) and The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016).
He is an associate editor of Critical Muslim (Hurst & Co.), a UK-based quarterly of ideas and
issues which presents Muslim perspectives on the great debates of our times.

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