’ … a sprawling stain on the pavement roughly the shape of Australia that couldn’t be mistaken for anything other than dried blood … limp, lifeless bodies, more than I can count. In contrast, “The Weight Of Our Sky” is more … matter-of-fact? The prose sticks to Melati’s voice, and sees what she sees. A nightmare vision – the love for one’s countrymen, unrequited and betrayed. The play’s text is a phantasmagoria: a woman gives birth in a ditch the riots rage around her Mahathir and Tun Dr Ismail speak in quotes over the din. The other piece of May 13 fiction I know of is Beth Yahp’s “In 1969″ – in its dramatised version, “That Was The Year”, the Five Arts Centre production. The stories I heard growing up mainly concern army checkpoints around the Port Dickson refineries or cops letting my dad dodge curfew to buy my mum the durian she craved (she was pregnant with my sister at the time). They remember the race riots as a distant anxiety. My parents were in their late twenties when 1969 happened. To get home, Melati has to deal with mobs trigger-happy soldiers her own literal inner demons. Kuala Lumpur is a warzone of ethnic strife. These men separate movie-goers by race: Malays on one side, Chinese on the other. Armed men barge into the cinema where she and a friend are watching a Paul Newman film. Secondary-school student Melati Ahmad’s world – already difficult she has obsessive-compulsive disorder – collapses one Tuesday afternoon. The book is basically a how-we-survived-the-apocalypse narrative? (Disclaimer: Hanna blurbed our book, so quite possibly I’m biased? But if you don’t want to listen to me you can listen to these other folks.) You should stop reading this post, and go get it. Finished Hanna Alkaf’s landmark debut novel, “The Weight Of Our Sky” today.
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