Interviews

In “The Unrepentant”, Sharmini Aphrodite explores the individual motivations that form and shatter liberation movements

Photo by the Japanese Press via Wikimedia Commons

I’ve been following Sharmini Aphrodite’s work since 2016. Her fiction is redolent with a devotion to the role that faith, ritual, and desire play in how we move through the world. Sharmini’s debut collection, The Unrepentant, explores the lesser-known histories of the war for liberation in Malaya (now Malaysia). Its fourteen stories (one of which can be read in EL’s own Recommended Reading), ranging from the 1940s to the 2010s, explore how religious faith and personal experience come into conflict with each other amid ongoing anti-colonial political struggle, and how love and faith complicate an already fractured society.

At its heart, the collection grapples with the way acts of love and acts of faith reckon with the very human emotion of doubt. The men and women in these stories—communists, laborers, miners, guerrilla soldiers, priests—persist in their beliefs despite the risks they face. For them, following their convictions can mean exile from community and country; loss of a homeland; or being forgotten by history and their own people. In the face of these dangers, their courage and resilience indicate hope and desire for a future that has not yet arrived. They may not have seen the future they wanted in their lifetime, but their work stretches into the present and cuts across generations of labor movements. The Unrepentant doesn’t offer easy resolutions to these struggles, but rather honors the individual stories that continually shape the future.

Sharmini and I met via Zoom to talk about what drew her to memorialize figures forgotten by history, how different permutations of faith intertwine with the human tendency to doubt, and how enlivening this history speaks to current liberation movements.

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Arin Alycia Fong: What drew you to write about the Malayan War and this particular period of history?

Sharmini Aphrodite: Over the years, there’s been much historical research on this period, historical secondary literature that is very strident, very robust, but I was interested to see how this might be manifested in personal experiences.

AAF: Is that why you were drawn to fiction as well?

**SA: **When I’m doing historical research and writing, there’s so much emotional residue that you can’t feed into an academic analysis. Fiction grants space to explore the interiority of certain characters or certain kinds of people, or even your own feelings related to the history. On the flip side, I actually think having objective distance in fiction has been an interesting thing to explore. A supposedly more “objective” and academic language, when woven into fiction, allows for the story itself to come before language. When you focus on sparse details, those details need to be powerful enough to stand on their own, without gimmick or flourish.

AAF: What comes through is how history is often very personal. Did you feel this growing up in Malaysia—how the past ripples into the present? How is your experience as a Malaysian shaped by this particular past?

**SA: **My experience as a Malaysian is colored by two fundamental points. In no particular order, one is the fact that I grew up in Johor Bahru. It’s the city that sits on the edge of the world’s busiest land border. Maybe more than 300,000 people cross daily. JB is Malaysia’s southernmost point and a causeway connects it to Singapore.

The context that we’re operating in today is so heavily shaped by the past to the point where the past is continually alive.

The next point is that I was born in Sabah—that’s where my maternal family is from and where they still are. A caveat is that the Bornean territories of Sabah and Sarawak have a very fractious history with West Malaysia, also known as Malaya. Malaya suppresses the Bornean territories culturally in order to extract resources from them. There is also an uneven relationship between Malaysia and Singapore because the developing Malaysia provides the developed Singapore with labor and resources that fuel its economy. These uneven relationships, they’re a product of colonial histories that stretch into the present day. This economic situation and the daily landscape of all three different places, “JB, Sabah, and Singapore,” colors my experience, because I sat at the nexus of all three of them and I saw these uneven layers.

AAF: You’ve mentioned that this collection is very indebted to historical inquiry. What is the most pertinent thing that you discovered when you were researching for The Unrepentant?

SA: What came up in a lot of the secondary literature were the attempts to forge solidarity between race, religion, and language, between all the different places that people came from in the past and where they end up, which in this case is Malaya. I was primarily driven by the fact that the context that we’re operating in today is so heavily shaped by the past to the point where the past is continually alive.

AAF: What are examples of secondary literature that bring this history to life in the present?

SA: Kaatu Perumal: the Folk Hero of Sungai Siput is a collection of oral histories by Dave Anthony. Kaatu Perumal was a real historical figure. He was born and raised around the plantation estates, and then he ended up joining the struggle later in life, and this collection is basically interviews that Dave Anthony did with the people who remembered Kaatu Perumal, whether they had grown up with him or whether they knew of him through secondhand memories, being descendants of workers from that plantation. There are so many small details that struck me, like the fact that he was an avid football player. It draws out that human dimension that we tend to forget.

AAF: The Unrepentant is about bearing witness to stories that were not memorialized by dominant narratives of history. How did you fill in the gaps? How did you come to know what you did not yet know?

SA: I had to first know what is in the historical record to be able to understand what is not. Archival records provide statistics, cartography, but they are produced by an elite class for whom it is integral that the people surveyed, that the landscape and events, remain merely statistics and cartography. All of these histories that we think are forgotten were not so much forgotten but deliberately excised from the historical record. If we understand that archives can only grant us the spine of history, then we also necessarily have to understand that a more complete history––never a fully complete one because I don’t think that’s possible––can only come from outside the archive. Things like weather reports, which might gesture to emotion, or maybe even a sheet of music, photographs. One has to read between the lines of statistics and cartography. What is not in the historical record is just as potent and perhaps even more so because there is a reason that it has been excised.

AAF: What also stands out in The Unrepentant is how love takes on different forms. Love for community, love across religious and ethnic lines, but also a love for this imagined country. For you, how does love shape the politics of liberation?

There is a ritual element to faith that makes it almost like a muscle memory.

SA: I’m thinking of the words of other thinkers and writers who have written about this much better than me. The late Father Gustavo Gutiérrez—he was the priest who penned this seminal text called A Theology of Liberation—said it best: “Love only exists among equals.” Love does come at a cost in the collection. It comes at the cost of belonging, both in this life and the next, but love is also generative.

AAF: Can you speak more to that, about love being generative?

SA: Che Guevara said that “the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.” To enter into a lot of these movements takes so much out of you. It comes at such a great cost, there’s so much sacrifice involved. You basically pull yourself out of the world that you know, out of the people and circumstances that you love, and you kind of wed yourself to this larger movement. It has to come from a place of love, a place of potentiality as a way to think about the possibility of a world that does not yet exist. It requires a great amount of hope. I think love underpins that hope because you can’t really be doing this for yourself—the cost of it is so high.

AAF: I think that largeness intertwines so much with faith and doubt. I see this in your work, that faith takes on many different shades. You have folk beliefs, and you also have institutionalized religions. What fascinates you about faith in the context of anti-colonial movements?

**SA: **I was raised religious, and I have found that faith and its language never really leave you, no matter how far you think you might have gone from it. For me, the syntax, the symbols…my touchstone remains, and I suppose will always be, Christianity. That’s the religion I was not just born and raised into, but inherited. Naturally, there is a ritual element of faith that makes it almost like a muscle memory. There’s language, there’s liturgy, there’s landscape and community. In a Southeast Asian context, this is true in terms of folk belief and institutionalized religion. The border between them is porous or non-existent in many cases. The key theme in the collection is how all faith is inherited. It’s the idea that faith is neither abstract nor isolated, but practical and communal. It binds you to both the past and the present.

AAF: How do you see The Unrepentant in conversation with existing literary works on the Malayan War? I’m thinking about Jeremy Tiang’s State of Emergency or Hai Fan’s Delicious Hunger, which Jeremy also translated.

**SA: **In all of these literatures, one of the key things that pops up is the jungle. It’s something that you cannot escape. The euphemism for joining the struggle was literally going into the jungle. It’s resonant even today, landscapes just beyond the urban border.

AAF: The spiritual ecology in stories like “The Pawang and the Miner” is really fascinating. How is this intersection between spiritual ecology and labor playing out?

Faith is a product. It sits at the intersection of land and labor.

**SA: **Tin mines are one of the central features of the land there. In Miracles and Material Life, Teren Sevea talks about the relationship between pawangs, these spiritual practitioners, and the tin miners. The tin miners, having come from China, would’ve been completely divorced from the landscape and everything that they knew, and the conditions of the mines were terrible. They would go to the pawangs for protection, and the pawangs would have all kinds of advice for them. So there’s this relationship that comes up that is based on this spiritual interaction between the miners who came from China and the pawangs who were thought of as local.

In all of this, the land is fundamental. Spiritual ecology, labor, and the land, they’re all inseparable. That brings me to the larger point of what was important to me about exploring the land as a sort of fulcrum. It’s crucial to the movement, because land and the labor that is engendered by working on it provides the material basis for anti-imperial movements in the book. The manifestation of imperialism is colonialism, which is often spurred by resource extraction. The land transcends modern nation states. It transcends modern realms. It has existed before them and will continue to exist after them. So it’s like faith as well. And I think faith, as it comes up in this collection, is a product. It sits at the intersection of land and labor.** **The land binds the past and the present, just like faith.

AAF: Going back to Catholic liberation theology, “Antipodal Points” explores this notion of faith and doubt. How is faith still relevant to liberation movements today?

SA: Faith binds the present to the past, but there’s a flip side where it binds the past to the present. The belief in something greater than yourself allows you to situate yourself as a small part of a much larger history, which encompasses not just the past, but also the potentiality of the present. Liberation may not arrive today or in your lifetime, but the work for it stretches across generations. Doubt is only human, right? But it also represents desire, desire for a better world. It also provides the impetus to reach that desire.

AAF: How do we transcend the many contentions you acknowledge in the book? How do we still have hope for a better world?

SA: Part of it is embracing the place of doubt. Things start going awry when people come into contact with doubt, but if we instead try to embrace doubt as a very natural thing, we can be less afraid of it. We can see it, perhaps, as a stepping stone, something generative. Of course, there’s going to be doubt when we are pulling together different faiths, different languages, all of these different backgrounds that people have. Of course, there’s going to be friction. But we can use that as a way to move forward instead of being stopped by it.

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