by Trailerman Sam (trailer17@hotmail.com)
As National Day drew nearer, I got hold of “Where Monsoons Meet”, a book that attempts to lead a new path away from the beaten tracks.
This history book of Malaya is refreshingly written in a highly readable manner and infused with entertaining cartoons as well.
It somewhat breaks new ground by recounting Malaya’s history from the people’s point of view. And this means Aug 31 holds sway.
As a patriotic Malaysian, I always feel that we need to always know how it all started. The very first step is to find knowledge so that the available information can be used to drive our country in a better direction. So that no one can oppress us, so to speak.
“Where Monsoons Meet” gives us that perspective. As we know, there are two monsoon seasons in the Malay Peninsula — the Southwest Monsoon (April-September) and Northeast Monsoon (October-March). Both monsoons are given the right time to meet up!
The 174-page work chronicles the years between 1400 up to 1960 in Malaya. It’s arousing and very much factual. What takes the cake is that the book is also funnily entertaining.
No doubt the facts may not be new or plucked from thin air. But the way things are portrayed in simple English makes it easier to understand in comparison to the thick buku-buku Sejarah in school.
Each page comes with a well-illustrated and witty comic narrating the country’s colonial past. Now and then, there are some bold remarks as well.
It’s said that this book was conceived and crafted at the height of the wave of student activism that swept through the institutions of higher learning in Malaysia and Singapore in the mid-1970s. It was first written in 1979 by a group of people who chose to be known only as Grassroots. Who were they and where are they now, very few know for sure.
Its many authors were drawn by the enthusiasm of undergraduates articulating about the economic and political developments of their home countries.
The version I am writing about was first published in 2019 by Gerak Budaya and collectively penned by Musimgrafik. Certainly, a must read for young citizens to comprehend issues and events that led to the formation of the Malayan nation.
It is a heartfelt attempt to define our collective identity by not even ignoring undesirable information or historical roots. Sprinkled with facts and figures, its episodes and anecdotes illustrate how each of the three major ethnic groups got together to form Malaya.
Although the story ends in 1957, this is not a story tangled into that pigeon hole. By reading this book, we would have a better understanding of the past, reinterpret the present and plan for a better nation in the future.
One last word: as the history of Malaya is part of the SPM syllabus, and if you happen to know any student struggling to load their memory with where it all started, namely from Parameswara, the Portuguese, Dutch and British in Malacca; the Japanese, the Communists and the British again and all the way to Merdeka, then this is the right book.
WE