Reviews & Press : : Fatimah's Kampung

KEMANUSIAAN 16 (2009), 121–123

BOOK REVIEW
BUCHANAN, Iain. 2008. Fatimah's Kampung. Penang: Consumer Association of Penang, pp. 1–120. ISBN: 978-983-3083-701.

Reviewed by
Arndt Graf
Universiti Sains Malaysia
arndtgraf@yahoo.de

The Personal Book

Fatimah's Kampung by Iain Buchanan is above all a very personal book. It is a book written by a meticulous person who has an eye for beauty and a heart for a deeply moral message. Fatimah's Kampung can also be read as a summary of the experience of its author who has seen more than just the old ways of his native England. As he writes in the Introduction, he recalled memories from his childhood in Southern Africa when he first came to post-independence Malaysia to teach geography for five years. He felt therefore strangely at home when he first smelled the Malaysian scents of roasted peanuts and bruised oil palm kernels, of frangipani and the forest after the rain.

On this personal level, Fatimah's Kampung can also be read as a symbol of the author's love to his Malay wife, her family and friends and the entire Malay and Malaysian culture they represent. On a similar level, the book also introduces the story of the author's Malay relatives to his non-Malay friends and relatives in Britain. He is teaching them not only about the life in a traditional Malay kampung, but also about the values that he associates with the Malay kampung culture.

However, once it was published, the book left the realm of the purely personal and entered the public sphere. As such, a number of other questions can be asked about the book.

Locating the Book in English lliterature

In the introduction, Fatimah's Kampung is classified as a book written for children and teenagers. In fact, as the text is rather complex, small children would probably find it rather difficult to understand. On the other hand, some adults might find the argumentation structure of the book rather simple, as the message of "Malay kampung culture being threatened by development" is more than clear and bold throughout the entire book.

Moreover, Fatimah's Kampung can be localised within the traditional context of British literature that features stories from more or less exotic places within the former Empire. One does not have to go back to Rudyard Kipling's famous Jungle Book (1894) to realize that the British encounter with the tropical nature and the various cultures of the former Empire resulted in a stream of exotic literature, often written for children in England. As the stories from the Jungle Book which centre on the figure of the Indian boy Mowgli show, in these stories it is often a child figure from one of the colonised cultures that is given the central role. It is Mowgli who experiences things, Mowgli who speaks, and by doing so it is Mowgli who conveys the moral message of the English author. In the case of Fatimah's Kampung, it is the girl Fatimah who is given that role. She even encounters the tiger, so well-known from The Jungle Book and its various adaptations in films and comics, although not under the Indian name of Shere Khan, as in the Jungle Book, but under the Malay name of Pak Belang. Another difference to Kipling's Jungle Book from 1894 is that in Buchanan's Fatimah's Kampung from 2008, the tiger and the other jungle animals are no longer able to protect the young human being, because now, in 2008, their very habitat is endangered and the forest cut down. In this sense, Fatimah's Kampung represents an adjusted employment of the old topos of a peaceful and harmonious relationship between human beings and nature in the tropical (former) colonies of England, as presented by the English artist(s).

The comparison with The Jungle Book also shows that in both books the main figure has to face evil threats. In the Jungle Book, it is the evil python Kaa who tries to eat Mowgli, while in Fatimah's Kampung Fatimah and her entire village are eaten up by evil development. This evil transformation of the peaceful and harmonious village life into that of a big city is blamed on a fictional sultan with economic self-interests.

By bringing in such elements from politics, the economy and the social order of the contemporary, post-independence Malay World, the author steps out of the British literary tradition of the assumed close relationship between the innocent "natives" of the colonies and nature. Now, in the post-independence world of Fatimah's Kampung, there seem to be powerful local elites who want to destroy the old harmonious ways.

With this message, the book cannot be considered only a children's book for audiences in Britain. It rather also carries messages to an audience in Malaysia, particularly since it is published here.