Edited by Jerome Kugan and Pang Khee TeikMatahari Books
Body 2 Body is the product of Malaysia’s young, hip and well-connected who’ve banded together to compile a collection of short stories and essays on living la vida non-normative. Edited by local art scene stalwarts Jerome Kugan and Pang Khee Teik, Body 2 Body is a landmark of sorts, mainly as the first anthology of local LGBT writing and as tangible evidence of Malaysia emerging out of the dark ages. Unfortunately, eclipsing this Book-of-Records significance is the violently uneven standard of writing. At times reasonably good (Brian Gomez and Shahnon Shah’s) but jaw-droppingly appalling in others (Abirami Durai and Jerome Kugan’s).
To begin with, Brian Gomez’s "What do gay people eat?" is a cracking tale of parental ignorance transformed into heartwarming acceptance. Gomez brings to life his central characters, a pair of middle aged Indian parents who are about to welcome their son and his boyfriend to home-cooked food for the first time. Agonising about what gay people eat (hint: not traditional Indian food as initially presumed), the dad soon learns that yes, gay people are just like everybody else and are not transported en masse from “the West.” At many turns funny and true to life, Gomez sets a fine example of a well-executed short story, something sadly not followed by others in Body 2 Body.
Don’t let a short story fool you into thinking it’s literary child’s play. The first rule in writing one, however, is simple: a good short story should not betray it’s primary descriptor: “short” (a memo Joyce did not read when he wrote The Dead). And because it is constrained by brevity, a good short story should also effectively evoke a moment in time and not a saga stretched out in six pages.
Overall, all the entries in this anthology do not have a problem with being short and sweet. The quality of storytelling in a few contributions, however, leaves plenty to be desired. Jerome Kugan’s "Alvin" is about an on-and-off relationship between two hard-partying men and is more like a poorly edited film with arty pretensions than an engagingly-written story. The couple, Alvin and Jay, share some relationship highs like tender conversations after sex, and lows like lack of commitment, and soon drift apart without proper goodbyes as moody anti-romantics do. To end his postmodern romance, Kugan’s epilogue for Alvin and Jay reads like a kinky French-Spanish film played on fast-forward:
A year later, Alvin and Jay are a couple, sharing an apartment in Mont Kiara. After a few months of lousy sex, they decide to have an open relationship. Jay meets Gochi, 26yo hottie originally from Singapore but working in KL to be closer to his mature Japanese expat boyfriend. Jay has sex with Gochi and offers threesome [sic] with Alvin. Alvin protests at first but after threesome [sic], confesses that he has fallen in love with Gochi. Jay is devastated, think it’s his fault, goes to Frangipani to get drunk. While drunk, he meets 40yo Hansen and 28yo Maria, a bisexual couple from London. Jay has sex with Maria while Hansen watches and masturbates. Later, Hansen fucks Jay while Maria sucks his cock. Jay is moaning as he is fucked, thinking of Alvin.Charming.
Abirami Durai’s "Have you seen my son?" shows great promise of being about trans-acceptance but is impeded by a flimsy sequence of improbable events and cliches: Alex is returning home from studying abroad and as friends and family do, they welcome the return of the prodigal son with bated breath at the airport. But it’s Anna who returns, not Alex. The shock and surprise of a transgender homecoming is severely offset by Anna’s entire family and friends not recognising her at all save for our narrator, Anna’s best friend. The two return to Anna’s home separately after her family and friends shuffle quietly back into the cardboard cut-out where they come from. There, we see Anna packing her old stuff to leave the family home for good because being literally invisible to her parents is much too unpleasant. As old friends do, the narrator and Anna reminisce about old flames until the dad suddenly walks in and asks Anna about Alex’s whereabouts. This leads to Durai’s ambiguous message on pseudo trans-accceptance; Anna’s dad is still clueless (or in denial or just visually impaired?) that she’s really his son, but compliments on how pretty she looks instead. At least he thinks she’s pretty! That’s gotta be good, right? Right?
Perhaps quirkiness verging on the surreal is a new and uniquely Malaysian writing style that I’ve yet to come to grips with. And maybe the schlock of the new will eventually herald substance and maturity. A bumpy road of a read made up of an uneven mix of good and substandard writing may one day smoothen out by work that are published not because they were the only ones lying around the editors’ desk. Body 2 Body is nonetheless a praiseworthy effort in putting non-normative genders and sexualities on the local literary map, but the schoolteacher critic in me cannot refrain from saying, “Can do better!”
Review by Alicia Izharuddin
